In a recent press release, VivoMetrics, Inc., a Ventura, California based company and maker of LifeShirt® cardiopulmonary continuous ambulatory monitor, has announced that the system is going to cosmos (where no boob jobs are allowed, as was disturbingly reported by us last week).
From the press release:
VivoMetrics, Inc., in partnership with the University of Limerick and sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be conducting a study to evaluate and determine the quality of sleep while in orbit with the ultimate goal of providing a healthier sleep environment for astronauts in the future. As part of the study, German astronaut, Thomas Reiter, is set to wear the VivoMetrics LifeShirt System aboard the International Space Station (ISS), after traveling there on the Discovery Space Shuttle later this year.
The VivoMetrics LifeShirt is the first non-invasive, ambulatory monitoring system that continuously collects, records, and analyzes a broad range of cardiopulmonary parameters. In the experiment, astronauts will wear the lightweight, machine washable garment with embedded sensors to record their sleeping activity. The LifeShirt will detect sleep activity and disturbance by assessing cardiac activity from an electrocardiogram (ECG) and other physiological parameters. At the same time, astronauts will use an integrated PDA to answer a series of sleep related questions as part of a subjective “sleep diary.” Analysis software will then produce a sleep spectrogram that researchers will use to measure the astronaut’s stability of sleep.
What’s not clear to us is whether the combination of breast implants plus the tight LifeShirt system is safe enough to go to space. Can breast implant monitoring be incorporated into the system?
Jokes aside, we were impressed to learn that LifeShirt also comes in pediatric sizes, and there are efforts underway to utilize this technology for monitoring children with a variety of cardiopulmonary disorders, such as cystic fibrosis and congenital heart defects.
The going-to-space press release…
The cystic fibrosis press release (old)…
The product page
Flashback: LifeShirt used to evaluate mood effects in athletes
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