Nisshash: Design of An IoT-based Smart T-Shirt for Guided Breathing Exercises

Breathing exercises are gaining attention in managing anxiety and stress in daily life. Diaphragmatic breathing, in particular, fosters tranquility for both body and mind. Existing methods, such as meditation, yoga, and medical devices for guided breathing, often require expert guidance, complex instruments, cumbersome devices, and sticky electrodes. To address these challenges, we present Nisshash, an IoT-based smart T-shirt offering a personalized solution for regulated breathing exercises. Nisshash is embedded with three-channel e-textile respiration sensors and a tailored analog front-end (AFE) board to simultaneously monitor respiration rate (RR) and heart rate (HR). In this work, we seamlessly integrate soft textile sensors into a T-shirt and develop a detachable and Wi-Fi-enabled (2.4GHz) bio-instrumentation board, creating a pervasive wireless system (WPS) for guided breathing exercises (GBE). The system features an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) and a seamless IoT-based control and computing system (CCS). It offers real-time instructions for inhaling and exhaling at various breathing speeds, including slow, normal, and fast breathing. Functions such as filtering, peak detections for respiration, and heart rate analysis are computed conjointly at the sender and receiver ends. We utilized the Pan-Tompkins and custom algorithms to calculate HR and RR from the filtered time-series signals. We conducted a study with 10 healthy adult participants who wore the T-shirt and performed guided breathing exercises. The average respiration event (inhale-exhale) detection accuracy was ≈98%. We validated the recorded HR against the 3-lead standard ECG monitoring device, achieving an accuracy of ≈99%. The RR-HR correlation analysis showed an R square value of 0.987. Collectively, these results demonstrate Nisshash’s potential as a personal guided breathing exercise solution.