Remote Monitoring of Elderly, Vulnerable, and Enhancing their Mobility, through Adaptive Intelligent Clothing (Single Platform Wearable) for Care Homes, Assisted Living and Personal Health: R&D, Expanded Testing and Product-Market Engagement

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 consistent and continuous remote care and monitoring of vitals for the elderly and vulnerable, further adding mobility-enhancing capabilities, through intelligent biometric clothing. Designed originally in the context of Defence, in response to COVID19 the company redefined and reoriented its intelligent clothing platform to combat the coronavirus in Care Homes. The company won the highly competitive Innovate UK '_Business-led Innovation in Response to Global Disruption_' competition to rapidly produce and field-test a basic version of its wearable IoT platform for the Care sector, as a feasibility study to mitigate the dramatic effects of the virus.

This project now seeks to move from feasibility study to experimental development, to address market demand in a real way. This will be accompanied by a sustainability study, as the underlying body-adaptive tech has the potential to disrupt clothing industry as a sustainable alternative.

The product being developed is washable, intelligent clothing that, through a patent-pending exoskeleton, adapts to any body-shape or size (thus allowing accuracy for embedded sensors, and further building towards a sustainable future by combating Fast Fashion). The clothing gathers, sends and remotely analyses biometric data. This includes early warning systems and distress detection. Embedded hardware enhances wearers' mobility and quality-of-life by allowing them to control surrounding devices with voice, gesture and touch; more intuitive than touching a screen/remote, a UI built on the human body.

The lack of continuous monitoring, combined with rapidly worsening symptoms, means that the Care sector was 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 make the prototype we developed and field-tested in our feasibility study market-ready, designing new mass-producible and scalable versions, aiming to supply Care Homes across the UK with a vital tool for this and future healthcare crises.