LOOMIA: What If? - The Breathe Shirt
As a part of our LOOMIA: What If? Series, a collection of posts to inspire creative techs and makers to use our components to prototype impactful products, we created a medical wearable called the “Breathe Shirt”; answering the question, “What if a t-shirt could improve outcomes of respiratory illness?”
This invention was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the respiratory complications that patients endure when ill with the virus. According to the CDC, 76.8% of patients hospitalized with COVID had respiratory complications (pneumonia, respiratory failure, and ARDs, among the most common). This is an alarmingly high percentage, and even more alarming is the thought that many of those patients may not have survived. Those who have, however, were most likely returned home to recover. The question is: is there anything to monitor the condition of those patients, besides a pulse oximeter or weekly telehealth checkups? The answer? Not really, but we have reason to believe that wearable technology could be a part of the solution.
For the Breathe Shirt, we took two Serpentine Bus Parts and two Single Pressure Sensors to measure respiration by rib cage expansion each time the wearer breathes in. A big breath in would increase pressure on the sensors, and result in a reading that the patient’s respiration is optimal and normal. Inadequate readings could signal trouble. For the physician to obtain readings from the shirt, a Bluetooth module and battery pack would be placed at the back of the shirt so the readings can be added to an online database.
We hope that this shirt inspires those in design to utilize pressure sensors to create medical wearables and other forms of wearable technology that benefits humanity. As our world continues to change due to this pandemic, we need to innovate to better suit the needs of a population that is becoming sicker and reduce the amount of pressure on our frontline workers. These are two problem areas that can be remedied with the help of wearables such as the Breathe Shirt.