Comfortable textile-based electrocardiogram systems for very long-term monitoring.

Recent advances in miniaturization of electrocardiogram (ECG) devices, as well as mobile computing, have fostered a dramatic growth of interest in wearable ECG sensor technology. The interest for comfortable textile-based ECG systems originates from the need for monitoring patients over extensive periods of time and reinforces the “doctor is always with you” paradigm since the usual clinical or hospital monitoring of the electrocardiogram provides only a brief window on the status of the patient. Very long-term monitoring ECG systems allow for serial comparisons of long segments of data, which provide robust characterization of the electric cardiac activity data. This approach provides much more information than the traditional, shortterm 12-lead ECG and provides a tool to study the dynamics of heart rate variability, restitution, the dynamics of repolarization and trends. This is due not only to the tremendous increase in research devoted to this area in the past few years but also to the large number of companies that have recently started investing aggressively in the development of wearable ECG products for clinical applications [1].