This application claims the priority of Republic of China Patent Application No.109142725 filed on Dec. 4, 2020, in the State Intellectual Property Office of the R.O.C., the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
The present invention relates to smart clothing, and more particularly, to smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities and lung respiratory conditions, which allows a user to have overall health monitoring in daily life or during exercise.
Innovations of medical technology introduce various sensing devices for sensing physiological signals of users nowadays, especially smart wearable devices that are getting popular and widely applied in various areas, for example, smart sport watch or wristband. Moreover, due to maturation of application technology such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud with big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), sport smart clothing becomes available and can be used to collect exercise data such as heart rate data, moving distance, respiration rate, and so on.
Conventional sport smart clothing however easily makes a user uncomfortable when wearing it because of its hardware structural limitation, which adversely affects accuracy of physiological signals being collected. For example, electrocardiogram (ECG) data are commonly used in cardiovascular disease analysis and diagnosis. Electric potential change of a heart itself reflects on human skin through conductive tissue around the heart and body fluids, and microelectrode technology is utilized to record potential difference between inside and outside of myocardial cells induced by tiny electric impulse change of the heart, that is to record electric potential change during a heart rhythm cycle, so as to collect results of multiple ECG leads. Generally, a plurality of electrodes and wires connected thereto are placed on body skin of the user, and all the wires are connected to a recorder to continuously monitor ECG signals of the multiple leads. However, the wires and recorder carried by the user usually bother the user's daily life, and noise is easily generated by any movement of the wires and recorder, making it difficult to analyze and read the signals. Further, it is not handy for the user to wear and remove the plurality of electrodes, wires or recorder, not to mention a trouble of cleaning them after use, such that the conventional smart clothing is not welcome.
Therefore, how to solve the above issues of the conventional smart clothing, such as wearing inconvenience, difficulty in cleaning and poor sensing accuracy when collecting physiological signals, is an important task to work on in the art.
In view of the above drawbacks in the prior art, a primary object of the present invention is to provide smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities and lung respiratory conditions, which allows a user to easily wear it like normal clothes, and allows physiological signals to be sensed regardless of the user's movement, so as to achieve effects of desirable adhesion to human skin and good sensing accuracy.
Another object of the present invention is to provide smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities and lung respiratory conditions, wherein its sensing elements are all made of soft fabric to give a user great comfort and are washable together with the clothing itself, such that the smart clothing is easy to clean and durable.
According to the above purpose and another purpose of the present invention, the present invention is to provide a smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities, the smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities including: a clothing body having a contact surface and an outer surface opposite to the contact surface, wherein the contact surface is for contacting human skin; an electrocardiogram lead collector including at least one lead collecting structure mounted on the contact surface of the clothing body, wherein the lead collecting structure includes a pair of electrodes, and lead wires respectively connected to the electrodes, with the electrodes and lead wires being made of conductive fabric, wherein each of the lead wires is formed with a first conductive connecting element at an end thereof extended in a predetermined direction, and the first conductive connecting element has a connecting end penetrating the end of each of the lead wires and the clothing body to be placed on the outer surface of the clothing body; and a control module including a substrate formed with a plurality of functional units and mounted on the outer surface of the clothing body, wherein the substrate is formed with a second conductive connecting element on a side thereof for being connected to the connecting end of the first conductive connecting element, so as to allow the plurality of functional units of the substrate to process heart physiological activity signals sensed by the electrocardiogram lead collector.
Preferably, in the smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities said above, wherein the substrate is further formed with a pair of third conductive connecting elements on the side thereof, and the smart clothing further includes: a respiration converter formed of a multi-layer structure, for outputting capacitance change signals corresponding to human body cavity undulation during breathing, wherein the multi-layer structure includes: an upper conductive fabric layer, a lower conductive fabric layer, an insulation film provided between the upper conductive fabric layer and the lower conductive fabric layer, at least one upper wire connected to the upper conductive fabric layer, and at least one lower wire connected to the lower conductive fabric layer, and the multi-layer structure is mounted on the contact surface or the outer surface of the clothing body, wherein the upper wire and the lower wire are made of conductive fabric, and each of the upper and lower wires is formed with a fourth conductive connecting element at an end thereof extended in the predetermined direction, and the fourth conductive connecting element is connected to the pair of third conductive connecting elements, so as to allow the control module to process the capacitance change signals outputted by the respiration converter and sense human body respiratory conditions.
Preferably, in the smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities said above, further including: a container bag attached to the outer surface of the clothing body, for accommodating the control module ; and the smart clothing further including: a first coupling element formed on the outer surface of the clothing body, wherein the container bag has a movable side formed with a second coupling element for being coupled to the first coupling element, and coupling between the first coupling element and the second coupling element allows the movable side to be lifted or closed in order to detach or mount the control module.
Moreover, the present invention further provides a smart clothing for sensing lung respiratory conditions, including: a clothing body having a contact surface and an outer surface opposite to the contact surface, wherein the contact surface is for contacting human skin; a respiration converter formed of a multi-layer structure, for outputting capacitance change signals corresponding to human body cavity undulation during breathing, wherein the multi-layer structure includes: an upper conductive fabric layer, a lower conductive fabric layer, an insulation film provided between the upper conductive fabric layer and the lower conductive fabric layer, at least one upper wire connected to the upper conductive fabric layer, and at least one lower wire connected to the lower conductive fabric layer, and the multi-layer structure is mounted on the contact surface or the outer surface of the clothing body, wherein the upper wire and the lower wire are made of conductive fabric, and each of the upper and lower wires is formed with a first conductive connecting element at an end thereof extended in the predetermined direction; and a control module including a substrate formed with a plurality of functional units, wherein the substrate is formed with a second conductive connecting element on a side thereof for being connected to the connecting end of the first conductive connecting element, and the substrate is mounted on the contact surface or the outer surface of the clothing body, so as to allow the plurality of functional units of the substrate to process the capacitance change signals outputted by the respiration converter and sense human body respiratory conditions.
Preferably, in the smart clothing for sensing lung respiratory conditions said above, further including: a container bag attached to the outer surface of the clothing body, for accommodating the control module; and the smart clothing for sensing lung respiratory conditions further including: a first coupling element formed on the outer surface of the clothing body, wherein the container bag has a movable side formed with a second coupling element for being coupled to the first coupling element, and coupling between the first coupling element and the second coupling element allows the movable side to be lifted or closed in order to detach or mount the control module.
Preferably, in the smart clothing for sensing lung respiratory conditions said above, wherein the substrate is further formed with a pair of third conductive connecting elements on the side thereof, and the smart clothing further includes an electrocardiogram lead collector, the electrocardiogram lead collector including: at least one lead collecting structure mounted on the contact surface of the clothing body, wherein the lead collecting structure includes a pair of electrodes, and lead wires respectively connected to the electrodes, with the electrodes and lead wires being made of conductive fabric, wherein each of the lead wires is formed with a fourth conductive connecting element at an end thereof extended in a predetermined direction, and the fourth conductive connecting element has a connecting end penetrating the end of each of the lead wires and the clothing body to be placed on the outer surface of the clothing body.
Advantageously the present invention utilizes conductive connecting elements such as buttons for being externally connected to a control module, such that the control module can be expanded or upgraded according to functional requirements. Further in the present invention, sensing elements and signal transmission wires are made of conductive fabric. This solves the problems of wearing inconvenience and difficulty in cleaning caused by installing transmission functional modules in the conventional smart clothing. As the conductive fabric sensing elements and signal transmission wires are well attached to a clothing body of the smart clothing, the sensing elements can be better adhered to human skin, and thereby sensing accuracy is improved.
The above and other aspects, features and other advantages of the present invention will be more clearly understood from the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which:
Embodiments of the present invention will now be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings. The invention may, however, be embodied in many different forms and should not be construed as being limited to the embodiments set forth herein. Rather, these embodiments are provided so that this disclosure will be thorough and complete, and will fully convey the scope of the invention to those skilled in the art. In the drawings, the shapes and dimensions of elements may be exaggerated for clarity, and the same reference numerals will be used throughout to designate the same or like components.
The present invention provides smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities and lung respiratory conditions, which is easy to wear, comfortable and durable. Firstly, as shown in
The electrodes 20 and lead wires 21 are made of conductive fabric. Each of the lead wires 21 has an end 210 extended in a predetermined direction and formed with a conductive connecting element 211, wherein the predetermined direction is a direction toward the control module 4. Electric signals sensed by the electrodes 20 are sent to the control module 4 by the lead wires 21, wherein a connecting end 211a of the conductive connecting element 211 penetrates the end 210 of each of the lead wires 21 and the clothing body 1A to be mounted on the outer surface 11 of the clothing body 1A, and the connecting end 211a of the conductive connecting element 211 is connected to the control module 4. The control module 4 is a substrate 40 formed with a plurality of functional units. The substrate 40 is placed on the outer surface 11 of the clothing body 1A, and a conductive connecting element 41 is provided on a side of the substrate 40 and used to be connected to the conductive connecting element 211 of each of the lead wires 21, as shown in
Referring to
Similar to the above embodiment shown in
Referring to
Referring to
It should be noted that, in order to better adhere the above conductive fabric electrodes or respiration converter to human skin or human body to facilitate sensing, in addition to
It should also be noted that, in another embodiment of smart clothing for sensing heart physiological activities and lung respiratory conditions in the present invention, a zipper (not shown here) can be provided at a collar or waist area of the clothing body at a position opposite to a dressing/undressing direction, to help the user easily put on or take off the clothing body; particularly, the zipper at the collar or waist area is very useful for the user to wear or remove such tight clothing body made of the elastic material.
The examples above are only illustrative to explain principles and effects of the invention, but not to limit the invention. It will be apparent to those skilled in the art that modifications and variations can be made without departing from the scope of the invention. Therefore, the protection range of the rights of the invention should be as defined by the appended claims.
Number | Date | Country | Kind |
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109142725 | Dec 2020 | TW | national |