European Trends: Smart rugs

EUROPEAN TRENDS

Smart rug

Are health rugs for horses the next big thing? JESSICA MORTON investigates.

Recent technological advances in wearable veterinary devices are bringing new levels of monitoring to horse management. In particular, e-textiles might provide a unique solution to help prevent illness and reduce costs in veterinary management.

Biomedical engineers and veterinarians from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, have designed a horse rug which incorporates electronic monitoring technology capable of alerting veterinarians and caregivers to potential health problems. A university study recently published in the Advanced Materials journal explored how the research team managed to convert stretchy off-the-shelf horse rugs into wearable e-textile devices that can monitor equine cardiac, respiratory, and muscular systems.

To add monitoring capabilities to the rugs, the team created a dual regime spray technique, allowing them to directly embed a pre-designed pattern of nanomaterials into the fabric. The sensors were then connected to a portable unit that shared the horse’s vital signs to a laptop via Bluetooth, collecting the valuable data in real time.

Why horse rugs?

For horse owners, e-textile technology could make it easy to monitor the health and well-being of their horses anywhere and anytime, as long as they have access to a device connected to the Internet.

According to Chi Hwan Lee, an associate professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering: “Adding e-textile properties to existing garments (like horse rugs) helps scientists, researchers and clinicians take advantage of the garments’ already-existing ergonomic designs to secure a commercial grade of wearability, comfortability, air permeability and machine washability.”

Because of its unique physical attributes and ability to conform and stretch around the curves and irregular body shapes of equids, fabric is the ideal medium for monitoring a horse’s vital signs.

In terms of health assessment, this is a major leap forward. “These specially designed e-textiles can comfortably fit to the body of humans or large animals under ambulatory conditions to collect biosignals from the skin such as heart activity from the chest, muscle activity from the limbs, respiration rate from the abdomen or other vital signs,” Lee explains.

Improve and detect

Fabric is also more user-friendly, since placing electrode sensors directly onto a horse’s skin usually necessitates shaving the hair or applying messy and uncomfortable adhesive to keep the device in place.

Because numerous contact points are spread over a larger surface area, a rug with sensors is able to collect more data than separate electrodes. This also means that the rug potentially offers a more accurate observation of a horse’s health and wellbeing at any given time and can record their vital biometrics even when they are healthy.

Once a horse’s healthy baselines are established, e-textile technology may be able to detect anomalies that could point

to the onset of an acute diseases or the acceleration of a chronic condition.

A new frontier

E-textile rugs are a revolutionary development for remotely tracking changes to a horse’s health and behavior, as well as providing an early warning system for chronic illness flareups. Whether vets, nurses, and other caregivers are nearby or in a more remote location, e-textile technology allows them to monitor horses for signs of illness such as colic, laminitis or asthma.

Future work will involve developing systems for continuous 24-hour monitoring of horses with serious disease and those receiving treatment in veterinary intensive care units. “We believe that our technology will be helpful in diagnosis or management of chronic diseases,” Lee says, “especially as demand increases for remote health monitoring of cardiac, respiratory and muscular systems while the horse is moving about.”

According to Laurent Couëtil, a professor at Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine: “Continuous monitoring would allow early detection of disease flare-up before it got serious. Remote monitoring opens the possibility of sending vital information to the veterinarian to help make timely and informed treatment decisions. The flexibility of the technology will allow the e-textiles to tightly fit various body sizes and shapes, delivering high-fidelity readings,” he added.

A real-life example would be monitoring severe equine asthma, which affects 14% of adult horses.

This exciting technology has the capacity to collect and transmit readings and send the data to a horse caregiver wherever in the world they happen to be located. The data values and results could then be easily read via an enduser application for real-time control of the sensing parameters. Wearable e-textile rugs might even be useful in tracking a horse's whereabouts. For example, a GPS tracker embedded in the rug and programed to send an alert if a horse escaped, or used as an additional security measure in high-risk settings such as shows or on overnight trail rides.

A patent for the technology has been filed by The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization.

FACING PAGE: Sensors embedded in rug fabric collect data to help evaluate a horse’s health and wellbeing. BELOW: The Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine team monitor a horse’s vital signs via a laptop and Bluetooth. BOTTOM: Professor Laurent Couëtil (R) collaborated with Associate Professor Chi Hwan Lee (L) on the technologically advanced rug design. All images by Rebecca McElhoe, Purdue University.