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BioShirt to monitor temperature, heart rate of athletes
Some of us here at Engadget enjoy spending our off-hours going for a run (believe it or not, we actually do have them on rare occasion) . While our routines don't quite compare to runners who train for marathons and other such intense sporting activities, we're nonetheless interested in the cool gadgetry that these hard-core types get to use. Earlier this week, a team of South Korean researchers debuted the BioShirt at the National Sports Festival, currently ongoing in that country. The BioShirt is specifically designed with athletics in mind and monitors the runner's temperature, heart rate and speed; it then sends that data to a wrist-worn monitor via Bluetooth. Kim Seung-hwan, the leader of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute team that built the BioShirt, told The Korea Times that the shirt could also have similar applications as a monitoring system for elderly or infirmed patients who need constant attention -- an idea we've seen before. Still, for some this runner's tech can't come too soon, especially after the loss of former Wired editor Bill Goggins earlier this year, who passed away from heart failure while running the San Francisco Marathon this past July.
South Korea outfitting elderly, disabled with bioshirts
Proving that there's more to working in South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication than just building insect-like robot soldiers for surveillance and killing, the department has initiated a pilot program which was designed to prevent, and not cause, people's deaths. Specifically, the agency is outfitting 100 elderly and disabled folks in Daegu City with so-called bioshirts, which as we've seen before, monitor a patient's vital signs and wirelessly signal for help if anything is awry. Called the "U-Healthcare Service," the $1.4 million program is initially targeting senior citizens who live alone, as well as patients with chronic ailments, and also provides options for running self-diagnostics, enabling remote monitoring, and even rudimentary medical consultations. [Via Smart Mobs, image courtesy of Sensatex]
