• Posted April 15, 2025

Smart Shirt Might Predict Heart Problems

A “smart shirt” equipped with an electrocardiogram (ECG) can help identify folks who are at higher risk of heart disease, a new study says.

The shirt monitors people’s heart rate recovery after exercise, tracking the time it takes for their heart to return to a normal rhythm.

“The heart’s response to exercise provides us with an early indicator of changes in health, in particular cardiovascular function and mortality,” senior researcher Manuel Hernandez, a professor of biomedical and translational sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in a news release.

For their study, researchers used a smart shirt developed by a Quebec-based company called Carré Technologies. The shirt is wired with sensors that capture continuous measures of heart performance, including electrical activity and heart rate.

The team recruited 38 people ranging in age from 20 to 76, and had them walk on a treadmill. Of those people, seven had been diagnosed with high blood pressure.

The data gained from these tests helped researchers design a system for predicting folks at highest risk for heart problems.

The study is a first step toward helping people better understand their personal risk for heart trouble, researchers said.

“We want to use it to provide us with some greater insight in terms of our underlying cardiovascular function,” Hernandez said. “And we want to make something that’s clinically actionable.”

Ideally, wearables would provide doctors with abundant and useful information, a co-author said. 

“One would like to have a whole bunch of data from wearables, and then that data is transmitted to a doctor’s office, and the doctor can interpret it,” said co-researcher Richard Sowers, a professor of industrial & enterprise systems engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

These sort of wearables would be especially useful for people in rural areas or other places with poor access to health services, Sowers said in a news release.

Future studies will increase the number of participants and track them over time, researchers said.

Other research teams also are considering the potential uses of “smart shirts.”

At a meeting of the European Association of Urology last month Italian researchers presented their design of a smart shirt that can track a patient’s vitals following their release from a hospital.

“Our patients found the T-shirt easy to use and over 90% reported it allowed them to feel safe and cared for while recuperating at home,” lead researcher Dr. Antonio Pastore, an associate professor of urology at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, said in a news release.

The new study appears in the IEEE Journal of Health Informatics.

More information

UCLA Health has more on wearable health technology.

SOURCE: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, news release, April 9, 2025