Wearable sensor systems: The challenges

Abstract

Given the soaring costs associated with the treatment of ever more prevalent chronic disease, it is widely agreed that a revolution is required in health care provision. It is often thought that the necessary technology already exists for the home-based monitoring of such patients and that it is other factors which are holding back the more widespread clinical uptake of these new tools. The authors suggest that the necessary sensor-related technologies are often not as advanced as may first appear; certainly they are generally not adequate for the robust, long-term monitoring of patients under real-life conditions. An additional problem is the evident efforts to apply a given sensor and related technology platform to any and all monitoring scenarios without sufficient consideration of patient needs and the clinical requirements. The authors review the key sensing platforms and suggest the applications for which they are best suited.

Wearable Electronics Sensors: Current Status and Future Opportunities

“…The wearable system should be light in design and will be worn at a place of the body so that it is not uncomfortable to wear 24/7 for 365 days. To make the wearable devices more acceptable to society, there is a need for more widespread clinical trials, and they should be robust for long-term monitoring of people for real-life conditions [145]. So far wrist watch, bangle or necklaces are such devices that are comfortable to many people.…”

Overview of Human Walking Induced Energy Harvesting Technologies and Its Possibility for Walking Robotics

“…Moreover, the energy harvester should be compact and lightweight to achieve greater ratios of power to volume and to weight, which is commonly pursued by such applications that have to attach something to the human body but avoid annoying the user. In addition, the energy harvesting devices are placed very close to the human body, so they should be designed and integrated based on ergonomics so as to wear comfortably and conveniently [141]. The less influence on the human body, the better people feel.…”

Wearable Sensing Framework for Human Activity Monitoring

“…In continuous monitoring scenario, the sensor data might have many portions that represents no activity. Detection and differentiating such activity and non-activity region from the timeseries sensor data is a challenging task [10].…”

“…Wearable technology faces three main challenges: communication capacity, computation power, and limited energy of the wearable device [10]. In this paper, we propose a framework to continuously monitor user activity using wearable devices.…”