Remote Monitoring of Elderly, Vulnerable, and Enhancing their Mobility, through Adaptive Intelligent Clothing (Single Platform Wearable) for Care Homes, Assisted Living and Personal Health

Care homes do not presently have the resources to continuously monitor their residents' vitals. Research shows that such monitoring can lead to dramatically enhanced care and critical response, and a much more effective allocation of NHS and care resources (trials, even just of interval-based monitoring, have been associated with a 35% reduction in GP visits, 71% in hospital admissions, and 33% in emergency admissions). Yet for care workers, regularly monitoring vitals is a "time-consuming, new and potentially challenging task" (Barker _et al_. 2020, in _Age and Ageing_ 49, 142), generally unsustainable, and continuous monitoring simply impossible.

The existing technological landscape for monitoring in care is fractured, with individual metrics requiring individual devices - meaning any attempt at consistent or holistic practices implies rapidly scaling costs in an already struggling industry. Care home owners and administrators "all \[...\]seem to agree that the ideal solution is a single platform into which all stakeholders, sensors and individual devices can feed and access data, and which records and manages everything in a single environment" (Technology and Innovation in Care Homes - The SEHTA Review).

Decorte Future Industries seeks to offer such a single platform, enabling 24/7 remote care and monitoring of vitals for the elderly and vulnerable, adding mobility-enhancing capabilities, all through intelligent clothing. Designed originally in the context of Defence, in response to COVID19 the company aims to rapidly produce a basic version of its wearable IoT platform for the care sector, to help combat the effect of the virus.

The product is a low-cost, washable, intelligent shirt, worn by residents, that through a patent-pending non-intrusive exoskeleton adapts to any body-shape or size (thus allowing accuracy for embedded sensors), gathering, sending and remotely analysing biometric data. This includes early warning systems and distress detection. At the same time, the embedded hardware enhances the wearer's mobility and quality-of-life by allowing them to control surrounding devices with voice, gesture and touch, all through their clothing - more intuitive and simple than touching a screen/remote: a UI built on the human body.

The lack of continuous monitoring, combined with a condition that can rapidly worsen, means that the care sector is being hit extremely hard by the COVID19 virus. Critical rapid response often simply comes too late. Lack of long-term data-gathering means inability to undertake preventative or predictive care. With this project, we aim to test and rapidly deploy new technologies to change that narrative.