Kymira launches heart-monitoring t-shirt

Kymira, a producer of human-powered infrared sportswear, has developed a cardiac monitoring t-shirt. The garment wirelessly transmits the wearer’s heart rhythm to a mobile device and can accurately identify an unusual heart rhythm that could cause a sudden cardiac arrest. The monitoring T-shirt uses a single lead ECG and movement-reducing hardware to offer more accurate readings during exercise.

The shirt, which will be available to sports teams in March and the public by the end of 2020, offers a way to reduce sudden heart attacks among athletes. The scientists at Kymira also plan to develop a five and 12-lead ECG version for medical purposes in the future.

Made from a lightweight infrared emitting fabric using KYnergy infrared technology, Kymira products regulate body temperature to improve the wearer’s performance because of the active minerals that are embedded into the fabric. The minerals capture the energy produced by the human body during exercise and send it back into muscles, providing increased circulation, boosts in tissue oxygen levels by up to 20 per cent and pain relief, especially reducing delayed onset muscle soreness.

The cardiac device currently has electrodes printed onto Kymira’s fabrics, which feed into a processing unit that takes the ECG data and transmits it via BLE to the cloud. There, Kymira’s proprietary algorithms process and clean the data to accurately detect irregular heartbeats.