Background
By means of smart-phones and smart-watches nowadays several online applications and services are giving an affordable and almost ubiquitous access to fitness training and semi-professional sport guidance as well as to e-health services for people. Recently, evolved AI-based cloud services appeared on many app-stores supporting meaningful and effective training scheduling for many popular sports including running, cycling, functional training, bodybuilding, CrossFit, or yoga.
With advancements in technologies for movement monitoring and 3D image processing/analysis, also skiing, calisthenics, and swimming more and more are becoming accessible for remote training through online platforms. The enabling technologies are smart body sensors which can monitor vital parameters such as heartbeat, muscular strain, respiration, but also energy expenditure, blood pressure, oxygenation, position, velocity, force, accelerations and in general biomechanical parameters for the full body and/or the single limbs in real-time. Wearable devices are a good solution to the addressed application needs.
In principle, wearables mainly consist of three groups of units, namely, one or more sensors that measure (electro) physiological signals, a data communication unit, and a data acquisition/analysis unit1. They are primarily employed for logging parameters like heart rate, burned calories or steps taken per day and are becoming increasingly popular due to the raising interest and awareness for a healthier lifestyle.
E-textiles with electronic properties have gradually appeared and have been developed towards flexibility and miniaturization. Flexible electronics in forms of fibres and textiles are one of the ideal forms of wearables due to their advantages of good flexibility, light weight, breathability, and easiness of integration with traditional clothing. Artificial Intelligence and local (on-the-edge) machine learning are the key technology for improved performances of the microsystems.
Answering to these needs, EU-TRAINS has formed a well-balanced pan-European consortium of industrial partners, SME, RTOs, and Universities, to leverage from the known European strength in the semiconductor design and fabrication and tackle the weakness of the higher levels of the supply chain: Integrated system and usercentric cloud-edge services.
