Anyone ever heard of LifeShirt?

[FTMPTB15]

I saw this news article and thought it was a fairly interesting concept...

NEW YORK -- A simple strap, usually worn underneath a shirt, could help save a firefighter's life even before he or she is in immediate danger. The LifeShirt, developed by VivoMetrics, has several embedded sensors that are constantly taking more than 25 body measurements a second.

“This is monitoring my heart rate, this is monitoring my respiration, this is monitoring my activity, this is actually monitoring my posture – I mean to be able to tell if someone is sitting down, laying down, if you have a firefighter laying down you probably have a problem and to be able to know, even if his heart rate is normal, you can get somebody to him a smoke-filled building,” says Scott Bryce of VivoMetrics.

All of that information is stored here and where it's then easily sent, wirelessly, to anyone who needs to monitor the numbers.

“I can get this remotely sensored to a laptop, so that an incident commander working at a fire, for example, and see my name Scott Bryce, number two, there's my heart rate and know whether I'm in trouble, where I am, am I standing up, am I sitting down, lying down, what's my breathing rate, and you could virtually do triage remotely,” says Bryce. “You can also more importantly know when to rotate people out. I can see when someone is about to stress, when they're getting to that dangerous level. The number one cause of death among firefighters for instance is heart attack.”
And while the obvious application here, especially around 9/11 is for firefighters, developers say they're actually looking way past just emergency first responders.

The technology was originally developed for doctors to keep constant tabs on high-risk heart patients.

“Imagine if you were wearing a t-shirt on the golf course and let's you're a heart patient, or I am, and your cell phone rings – I answer it and they say ‘Mr. Bryce, the doctor would like to see you.’ I say, ‘sure when should I come in?’” says Bryce. “They say, ‘you can sit down right now, would be a good idea, we’re sending someone.’”

“There are dog shirts, there are horse shirts, this could be used for training horses, this could be used for training athletes, there's interest from the NFL," adds Bryce.

Developers say it is also being tested by the air force and the army.

The first-responder LifeShirt right now is still at the research level. The consumer version is available as a prescription medical device. It costs $2,500, though developers insist if the device catches on, that price will drop the more ubiquitous it gets.

http://www.news14charlotte.com/content/top_stories/default.asp?ArID=128105

There is also a video on the website.

[jshively]

Fairly sure they had a booth at FDIC.

Check out their website which has some information on their first responder system:

http://www.vivometrics.com/responder/

Without ever having used it, all I can say is that I like the concept. Maybe someday we will all be wearing these things under our turnout gear.

[cozmosis]

Hrm. I'm not so sure about this one...

I love technology. I love new things. But am I the only one who thinks we can take things a bit too far? I can just see us having to have another chief whose sole job is to watch the heart monitors during an incident.

[NJFFSA16]

How will it help those officers who have no heart?

Surely...yes, I jest.