Textiles for healthcare monitoring

As living standards improve and people live longer, their medical and healthcare requirements become greater, causing unsustainable strains on the healthcare providers which will inevitably affect the quality of the care being offered. To address these eventualities, patients in the twenty-first century increasingly need to be cared for at their homes and, where possible, to be monitored remotely, thus leaving the much needed hospital beds 

---

GriUet, A., Kinet, D., Witt, J., Schukar, M., Krebber, K., Pirotte, F., Depre, A., 2008. Optical fiber sensors embedded into medical textiles for healthcare monitoring. Sensors Journal, TEEE 8 (7), 121.5-1222. 

Piezoeleetrie polymers in the form of aUgned fiber mats offer a huge potential for integration into textiles, on and even within the body, enabling applieations in monitoring vital signals for healthcare appUeations or sports. 

The lo-tech humble cotton sheet can now be thought of as a dynamic siuface that could potentially monitor, store and transmit information relating to your immediate state of health, deliver your drugs to you, proteet you against bacterial contamination, and, as this pq)er proposes, it could also monitor and detect levels of contamination. Its very close proximity to the way we live offers an unprecedented opportunity to not only reduce delay times in du ostics, monitoring and drug delivery, but also to deliver a unique and personalised response in these aspects as the textile is next to the skin and can respond to individual needs. The opportunity for textiles to enhance patient safety, improve healthcare delivery and to improve treatment outcomes is very real. 

---