Resumen de Every Breath You Take.
This article describes a high-tech shirt that reads and records ones vital signs all day and night. More than 12 million Americans suffer from sleep apnea, a disorder characterized by frequent interruptions of breathing. The cause can be either obstructive--a temporary closing of the soft tissues around the airway-or neurological; in both cases, the condition forces the sleeper to awake briefly to resume breathing, as many as 400 times in a single night. If left untreated, the disorder can raise the risk of cardiovascular problems, but the great majority of sufferers simply endure their nightly struggles and constant fatigue. One obstacle is that doctors cannot definitively diagnose sleep apnea unless the patient spends a night under observation in a sleep lab. Now a better solution may be at hand. VivoMetrics, a company based in Ventura, Calif., has fashioned a wearable device that can record vital signs throughout the day and night. Called the LifeShirt, it is a sleeveless spandex garment equipped with an electrocardiogram (ECG) for gauging heart rate and embedded wires for measuring respiration. In Denver, a clinic run by Kaiser Permanente is using the LifeShirt to monitor sleep problems in children.
