A new intelligent T-Shirt designed for use in hospitals to monitor a patient’s health utilises SMS text messaging to alert doctors. It is yet another example of how SMS services are increasingly being used by the healthcare industry.
The garment, developed at La Paz Hospital in Madrid and funded by Spain’s Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, allows doctors to register a patient’s physiological parameters in a non-intrusive manner. The garment could have a number of interesting outcomes for healthcare in the future.
Areas where the T-shirt is likely to have a big impact could be in the area of monitoring patients in their homes. The information management system of the intelligent T-shirt stores all of a patient’s medical information as it monitors their health. It is possible to set a series of alarms that activate health workers via an SMS alert message should anomalies, such as increased body temperature or increased heart rate, occur in patients.
“The information gathered by an intelligent t-shirt using e-textile technology is sent, without using wires, to an information management system, which then shows the patient’s location and vital signs in real time”, explained the researchers who developed the device.
SMS Services in the Healthcare Industry
Text messaging services are becoming increasingly used within the health industry, not only to remind patients of appointments, but to monitor and improve health as well. For example, researchers at Swansea University have developed a new text messaging service designed to come to the aid of diabetes sufferers in an emergency.
Meanwhile, studies in the US have proved that regular text messages can help smokers to quit. Researchers at the University of Oregon and UCLA found that after sending eight text messages per day for three weeks to smokers it improved their chances of quitting.
An SMS alert system is faster and cheaper than phoning or writing to customers and much more likely to be read than email.
