Sustainable Wearable E-textiles For Remote Monitoring Of Atrial Fibrillation Patients

Year 2024-2027

 Shaila Afroj

Funded by EPSRC New Investigator Award

Partners Levidian, Bristol Heart Institute, Kymira Ltd

This project will develop sustainable wearable electronic textiles (e-textiles) to remotely monitor atrial fibrillation (AF) patients (currently ~1.3M in UK) that will either biodegrade or can be recycled at the end of their useful life. This will be achieved via novel bespoke solution processing of conductive inks and sustainable digital manufacturing of e-textiles. Multifunctional wearable e-textiles developed from this project will provide a sustainable alternative to existing bulky, intrusive, noisy and labour-intensive ECG recorders for AF patients, potentially saving ~£2.2 billion of NHS cost per year in the UK alone.

The development of robust and reliable smart e-textiles at a mass-scale is challenging due to their current limitations: material sustainability, complex and time-consuming fabrications, and poor performance for clinical applications. Wearable e-textiles require a step-change in material preparation and selection of sustainable textile fibres and electronics that can be fully disintegrated, biodegraded or recycled into eco-friendly or reusable end-products. Moreover, currently wearable e-textiles are manufactured by multi-stepped, time-consuming and expensive processes where material waste, energy and water consumption are very high.

To address this, the project will develop sustainable conductive inks and surface treatments for naturally rough and porous textiles of biodegradable fibres. The inks will be digitally inkjet printed on surface pre-treated textiles in a direct mask-less sustainable approach with minimum material waste. The developed wearable e-textiles will be evaluated and validated with healthy volunteers and NHS patients for remote health monitoring of arrhythmia patients, followed by their sustainability assessment. All work will be overseen by the advisory board to ensure academic rigour and suitability for practical implementation. The research outcome will impact broad industrial applications in diverse fields (e.g., medical textiles, workwear, activewear, wearable garments for personalised health and wellbeing). This is potentially game-changing in healthcare economics, reducing ~60% hospital cost per patient, and improved personalised individual outcomes.

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