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• Posted March 25, 2025

High-Tech T-Shirt Tracks Patients' Vitals

A high-tech T-shirt loaded with sensors can help track patients’ vital signs after their release from a hospital, researchers say.

The shirt could help people return home sooner to recover, based on findings from a small group of patients who wore the gadget-filled garment after urological surgery for cancer.

“Our patients found the T-shirt easy to use and over 90% reported it allowed them to feel safe and cared for while recuperating at home,” lead researcher Dr. Antonio Pastore, an associate professor of urology at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, said in a news release.

For the study, researchers helped design a light T-shirt with sensors that monitor heart electrical activity, respiration, heart rate, body temperature and more. The shirt forwards the data to an app and web-based software.

“The T-shirt we gave to patients differs from smartwatches and other wearables,” Pastore said. “It can reveal more data, including electrolytes, which we need to continue to monitor after bladder surgery as they can reveal mineral imbalances that lead to serious complications.”

Researchers compared 35 people given the T-shirt to wear following robot-assisted urological surgery against 35 other surgical patients provided standard care.

The standard care patients were discharged from the hospital as normal, three to five days after surgery.

But the T-shirt patients were let go a day to a day and a half earlier, and asked to wear their telemonitoring garment in three-hour windows daily for around two weeks.

About 26% of patients in the standard care group needed to return to the hospital before their scheduled follow up, versus 6% in the T-shirt group, results show.

The T-shirt also detected the onset of heart problems in five patients, allowing for early diagnosis and treatment, researchers said.

“In Italy, where standard discharge time after this type of robotic-assisted urological surgery can be at least 72 hours, being able to allow patients home sooner improves their quality of life as they feel more comfortable in their own environment, and it means we can free up hospital beds too,” Pastore said.

Researchers presented their findings Saturday at the annual meeting of the European Association of Urology in Madrid.

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

“This sensory T-shirt appears to be a promising remote monitoring technology for helping patients to recover well at home after robotic-assisted urological surgery,” EAU meeting chair Dr. Maarten Albersen, a urologist at UZ Leuven in Belgium, said in a news release.

“The trial is early stage, but the insights are very interesting, particularly since patients strongly accepted the wearable and it was able to detect complications in real-time and reduce unnecessary rehospitalizations,” he said.

However, Albersen also warned that “given the small size and preliminary nature of the trial, before we can see this sort of wearable in clinical practice more data is needed on its ability to support earlier discharge from hospital, and its true impact on outcomes and cost-effectiveness.”

More information

UCLA has more on wearable health technology.

SOURCE: European Association of Urology, news release, March 21, 2025