The right shirt can make you look like a heartbreaker but one Montreal company is making clothes that make sure your ticker is still ticking.
The shirts made by Hexoskin look like a standard polyester undergarment but hidden sensors and cardiac electrodes make it a complete medical monitoring system.
Hexoskin co-founder Pierre-Alexandre Fournier said he keeps his on all the time.
“It monitors my cardiac activity, my respiratory activity and my movement activity in general,” he said.
The garment has a small battery sewed inside which powers all that technology. Fournier said performance athletes are the current main customers but the small team at Hexoskin is aiming for a much larger market.
“In the future, we hope that these shirts will be used to manage chronic conditions for cardiac patients, for patients with respiratory diseases and other chronic conditions,” he said.
Fournier said the shirts could lead to much more convenient monitoring and treatment, allowing doctors to monitor their patients from their homes. While that kind of long-distance application could be a step forward, Fournier also envisions another giant leap via another target demographic: astronauts.
Canadian Astronaut David St-Jacques will wear a Hexoskin shirt when he boards the International Space Station in 2018.
“The central issue with deep space, long duration expeditions or you go to Mars, is that you’re far away,” said St-Jacques. “You gotta shift from a mentality of telehealth where you cannot call the doctor on Earth to a status where the crew is autonomous.”
