Reconfigurable Fabric Vest for Fatal Heart Disease Prevention

In recent years, exciting technological advances have been made in development of flexible electronics. These technologies offer the opportunity to weave computation, communication and storage into the fabric of the every clothing that we wear, therefore, creating intelligent fabric. The implications of seamlessly integrating a large number of communicating computation and storage resources, mated with sensors and actuators, in close proximity to the human body are quite exciting. This paper present Reconfigurable Fabric-Vest (RFab-Vest) designed and implemented at UCLA for a medical application. Such a vest would have sensors for physiological readings, and softwarecontrolled, electrically-actuated trans-dermal drug delivery elements. Furthermore, computational elements are embedded in the vest for collecting data from sensors, processing them and driving actuation elements. Since the RFab-Vest will be used for medical, life-critical applications, the single most critical requirement of such a vest is an extremely high level of robustness and fault tolerance. Meantime, the key technological constraint for these mobile systems is their power consumption. Our target application for the RFab-Vest is the detection of possibly fatal heart problems, specifically unstable angina pectoris or ischemia. We illustrate the design stages of RFab-Vest. Moreover, we measure the robustness of our system with existence of various faults. Finally we present a summary on the power consumption of several configurations of the RFab-Vest as well as the computational capability of our processing units for the specific application that we implemented.