Health Canada has cleared health monitoring underwear from Onatrio-based Myant.

The textile computing company has secured clearance for its biosensing Skiin underwear. This Class II medical device clearance allows garment wearers to monitor their ECG data reliably and continuously.

Additionally, wearers can track other metrics, including heart rate, HRV and core body temperature, with more to come such as sleep and location.

Available in a number of comfortable and accessible form factors, the products – which are also pending FDA clearance – can improve remote patient monitoring and chronic care management through passive, continuous connection and data collection.

Myant believes Skiin will support patients, their loved ones and their practitioners in the shift towards more personalised care, especially in vulnerable communities such as the aging population.

“Cardiovascular disease remains the number one cause of death in the elderly population in North America,” said Tony Chahine, Myant CEO, “with cognitive decline attributed to loneliness on the rise. Though Myant’s vision is vast, we have adopted a laser focus on solving this looming challenge.”

Today’s healthcare system operates on episodic and reactive care instead of continuous and preventative care, patient self-reporting, and disjointed support from a patient’s care circle.

“I believe that Skiin will help patients overcome existing deterrents and barriers to adequate healthcare, helping serve our most marginalised populations by connecting them to care, to their family, friends, care providers and practitioners,” said Myant’s EVP Ilaria Varoli.

Chahine added: “Today’s healthcare system relies on events and episodic data, patient self-reporting, and disjointed support from a patient’s care circle. We believe that without holistic and continuously connected care, our marginalised and vulnerable communities like our aging population will continue to be underserved and at risk of lower efficacy in medication and rehabilitation programme adherence.”

Skiin will be commercially available to the general public later this year. The platform continuously and ambiently connects people to their bodies, to each other, and to the world around them, using connected textiles that can sense and react to the body and a platform that enables machine learning-driven health and performance outcomes.

The Skiin layering system has a human-centric design that allows wearers to maintain their regular behaviour. Sensors continuously capture multi-location health and wellness signals. This aggregated data creates a health and wellness baseline.