Unobtrusive Sensing and Wearable Devices for Health Informatics

By Yali Zheng, Xiaorong Ding, Carmen C. Y. Poon, Benny P. L. Lo, Heye Zhang, Xiao-Lin Zhou, Guang-Zhong Yang, Ni Zhao, Yuan-ting Zhang. 2014

703 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aging population, prevalence of chronic diseases, and outbreaks of infectious diseases are some of the major challenges of our present-day society. To address these unmet healthcare needs, especially for the early prediction and treatment of major diseases, health informatics, which deals with the acquisition, transmission, processing, storage, retrieval, and use of health information, has emerged as an active area of interdisciplinary research. In particular, acquisition of health-related information by unobtrusive sensing and wearable technologies is considered as a cornerstone in health informatics. Sensors can be weaved or integrated into clothing, accessories, and the living environment, such that health information can be acquired seamlessly and pervasively in daily living. Sensors can even be designed as stick-on electronic tattoos or directly printed onto human skin to enable long-term health monitoring. This paper aims to provide an overview of four emerging unobtrusive and wearable technologies, which are essential to the realization of pervasive health information acquisition, including: 1) unobtrusive sensing methods, 2) smart textile technology, 3) flexible-stretchable-printable electronics, and 4) sensor fusion, and then to identify some future directions of research.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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Citations in the corpus

Reinforcement Learning in Healthcare: A Survey (2019, background): “The recent development in sensor networks and wearable devices has facilitated the advent of new era of healthcare systems that are characterized by low-cost mobile sensing and pervasive monitoring within the home and outdoor environments [254].”
Wearable Sensors for Human Activity Monitoring: A Review (2015, background): “An overview of unobtrusive sensing platforms either in wearable form or integrated into environments is presented [72], [73].”
Smartphone Applications for Patients' Health and Fitness. (2016, background): “be woven or integrated into clothing, accessories, and the living environment, such that health and fitness information can be acquired seamlessly and pervasively in daily living.(35) Such sensors may provide more objective and accurate data on health and fitness to the smartphones, and apps may be ”
Continuous Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation Using Pulse Transit Time and Photoplethysmogram Intensity Ratio (2016, methodology): “BP and could become the most widely used technique for noninvasive continuous BP monitoring in the future [4], [5], there are still several problems to be solved before its widespread appli-”
Towards Ubiquitous Blood Pressure Monitoring via Pulse Transit Time: Theory and Practice (2015, background): “We refer to a recent review for more on advances in ECG and other sensing technologies [5].”
From Wearable Sensors to Smart Implants-–Toward Pervasive and Personalized Healthcare (2015, background): “The ability of real-time data capture and the need for integration with a diverse range of heterogeneous data sources has presented unique challenges in sensor informatics [63].”