ABSTRACT
Modern people are interested in healthier elderly life and preventing chronic diseases, and more innovative portable devices for healthcare with a more comfortable and interactive ubiquitous computing environment. There have been integrated and converged studies among medicine, textiles, and electronic technology. The electro-conductive yarn and fabric may be applied to the development of more innovative and high-tech portable smart textile systems. This research aimed to develop the E-textile based Smart Medical Glove Systems (SMGS) with Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator (TENS) as healthcare devices for the Elderly chronic diseases as the hypertensive, and to investigate the cure performance of the SMGS. The SMGS with TENS is used for the cure of hypertension by electrically stimulating meridian points on the palm based on the principles of acupuncture in oriental medicine. Thirty-two female subjects (Age: 40-70’s) 131were divided into two groups: Acute hypertension group (N: 16) and Chronic hypertension group (N: 16), had been suffering from hypertension participated in the cure performance test. Blood pressure and pulse rate were measured before and after wearing the SMGS with TENS for 15min. The subjects filled out a post-study questionnaire consisting of usability questions for each of the SMGS. The blood pressure of all 32 subjects decreased from 140.19±5.69 mmHg to 123.16±6.16 mmHg in systolic blood pressure after wearing SMGS. The paired T-test showed that the changes were statistically significant ***p<.001 for both systolic and diastolic blood pressure in both groups. On the result of the usability, using Principle Components Analysis (PCA), Varimax rotated PCA was applied to the measured usability. The sixteen usability questionnaires were categorized into 4 factors according to their correlations, and the results of usability were shown as wear-comfort: 3.1875, user-cognition: 4.1250, user-interaction: 3.8516, use-information: 3.6719. This research found that the blood pressure of all of the subjects after wearing SMGS decreased significantly, and we can suggest that the SMGS with TENS could be an easy-to-use and comfortable high-tech healthcare device based on E-textiles for the hypertensive Elderly.
