Wearable healthcare systems, new frontiers of e-textile.

There is a growing need of renovation in our health care managing systems; people need to be more interactive and more conscious of their own health condition in a way to adjust incorrect lifestyles, to obtain a personalized therapy tuned to their own physiological reactions and on their own environmental condition. To gain knowledge of a citizen's health status and to monitor without harassing them (until they refuse any medical supervision), a comfortable remote monitoring of important physiological parameters is necessary. The approach is therefore to integrate system solutions into functional clothes with integrated textile sensors. The combination of functional clothes and integrated electronics and on-body processing, is defined as e-textile and gives rise to intelligent biomedical clothes. Systems, designed to be minimally invasive, are based on smart textile technologies, where conductive and piezoresistive materials in the form of fiber and yarn are used to realize clothes, in which knitted fabric sensors and electrodes are distributed and connected to an electronic portable unit. These systems are able to detect, acquire and transmit physiological signals. They are conformable to the human body, and move towards improving the patient's quality of life and their autonomy. These systems are also cost-effective in providing around-the-clock assistance, in helping physicians to monitor for example cardiac patients during periods of rehabilitation, and in addition result in decreased hospitalization time. Finally, by providing direct feedback to the users, they improve their awareness and potentially allow better control of their own condition, while the simultaneous recording of vital signs permits parameter extrapolation and inter-signal elaboration that contributes to produce alert messages and personalized synoptic tables of the patient's health.