Smart wearable systems: Current status and future challenges

Health monitoring systems have rapidly evolved during the past two decades and have the potential to change the way health care is currently delivered. Although smart health monitoring systems automate patient monitoring tasks and, thereby improve the patient workflow management, their efficiency in clinical settings is still debatable. This paper presents a review of smart health monitoring systems and an overview of their design and modeling. Furthermore, a critical analysis of the efficiency, clinical acceptability, strategies and recommendations on improving current health monitoring systems will be presented. The main aim is to review current state of the art monitoring systems and to perform extensive and an in-depth analysis of the findings in the area of smart health monitoring systems. In order to achieve this, over fifty different monitoring systems have been selected, categorized, classified and compared. Finally, major advances in the system design level have been discussed, current issues facing health care providers, as well as the potential challenges to health monitoring field will be identified and compared to other similar systems.

Smart health monitoring systems: an overview of design and modeling.

Wearable health monitoring is an emerging technology for continuous monitoring of vital signs including the electrocardiogram (ECG). This signal is widely adopted to diagnose and assess major health risks and chronic cardiac diseases. This paper focuses on reviewing wearable ECG monitoring systems in the form of wireless, mobile and remote technologies related to older adults. Furthermore, the efficiency, user acceptability, strategies and recommendations on improving current ECG monitoring systems with an overview of the design and modelling are presented. In this paper, over 120 ECG monitoring systems were reviewed and classified into smart wearable, wireless, mobile ECG monitoring systems with related signal processing algorithms. The results of the review suggest that most research in wearable ECG monitoring systems focus on the older adults and this technology has been adopted in aged care facilitates. Moreover, it is shown that how mobile telemedicine systems have evolved and how advances in wearable wireless textile-based systems could ensure better quality of healthcare delivery. The main drawbacks of deployed ECG monitoring systems including imposed limitations on patients, short battery life, lack of user acceptability and medical professional's feedback, and lack of security and privacy of essential data have been also discussed.

A comprehensive survey of wearable and wireless ECG monitoring systems for older adults

Technology has become ubiquitous, it is all around us and is becoming part of us. Togetherwith the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and enabling technologies (e.g., Augmented Reality (AR), Cyber-Physical Systems, Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain or edge computing), smart wearables and IoT-based garments can potentially have a lot of influence by harmonizing functionality and the delight created by fashion. Thus, smart clothes look for a balance among fashion, engineering, interaction, user experience, cybersecurity, design and science to reinvent technologies that can anticipate needs and desires. Nowadays, the rapid convergence of textile and electronics is enabling the seamless and massive integration of sensors into textiles and the development of conductive yarn. The potential of smart fabrics, which can communicate with smartphones to process biometric information such as heart rate, temperature, breathing, stress, movement, acceleration, or even hormone levels, promises a new era for retail. This article reviews the main requirements for developing smart IoT-enabled garments and shows smart clothing potential impact on business models in the medium-term. Specifically, a global IoT architecture is proposed, the main types and components of smart IoT wearables and garments are presented, their main requirements are analyzed and some of the most recent smart clothing applications are studied. In this way, this article reviews the past and present of smart garments in order to provide guidelines for the future developers of a network where garments will be connected like other IoT objects: the Internet of Smart Clothing.

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/7/12/405/pdf

Towards The Internet of Smart Clothing: A Review on IoT Wearables and Garments for Creating Intelligent Connected E-Textiles

Wireless power transmission (WPT) is an emerging technology that is gaining increased visibility in recent years. Efficient WPT circuits, systems and strategies can address a large group of applications spanning from batteryless systems, battery-free sensors, passive RF identification, near-field communications, and many others. WPT is a fundamental enabling technology of the Internet of Things concept, as well as machine-to-machine communications, since it minimizes the use of batteries and eliminates wired power connections. WPT technology brings together RF and dc circuit and system designers with different backgrounds on circuit design, novel materials and applications, and regulatory issues, forming a cross disciplinary team in order to achieve an efficient transmission of power over the air interface. This paper aims to present WPT technology in an integrated way, addressing state-of-the-art and challenges, and to discuss future R&D perspectives summarizing recent activities in Europe.

Wireless Power Transmission: R&D Activities Within Europe

For the first time, a personal distributed exposimeter (PDE) for radio frequency (RF) measurements is presented. This PDE is designed based on numerical simulations and is experimentally evaluated using textile antennas and wearable electronics. A prototype of the PDE is calibrated in an anechoic chamber. Compared to conventional exposimeters, which only measure in one position on the body, an excellent isotropy of 0.5 dB (a factor of 1.1) and a 95% confidence interval of 7 dB (a factor of 5) on power densities are measured. Bioelectromagnetics. 34:563–567. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

/pdf/personal-distributed-exposimeter-for-radio-frequency-bjidppug4m.pdf

Personal distributed exposimeter for radio frequency exposure assessment in real environments.

Textile Integrated Breathing and ECG Monitoring System

A system is presented that monitors two of the most vital physiological parameters integrated in a wearable textile garment. Emphasis is put on the selection of sensing systems that are mechanically robust to suit the use in clothing. One application is with newborns suffering from an elevated risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Heart and breathing rate are measured by sensing systems implemented on flexible substrates, integrated onto textile. Breathing rate is assessed by extracting accelerometer signals, which can also be used to detect the posture of the baby. The accelerometers have an accuracy of 1 mg and consume less than 2 mA, interface circuit included. Heart rate is assessed through ECG measurement with dry electrodes and a three-stage differential amplifier with a CMRR of 106 dB at 50 Hz. The system operates on a flexible 3.7 V battery and sends its acquired data wirelessly (at 2.4 GHz with a bandwidth of 770 Hz) to a computer, which processes and visualises the two parameters. Processing involves filtering and peak detection algorithms to extract the breathing and heart rate in Matlab. Because the presented work focuses on the two most important vital signs, the system already proves more robust than common home monitoring SIDS applications, typically focusing on a single parameter. Moreover, the use of accelerometers enables a safe and hermetic packaging technique that excludes unwanted interference.

Robust monitoring of vital signs integrated in textile

This paper describes the design, calibration, and measurements with a personal, distributed exposimeter (PDE) for the on-body detection of radio frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields due to Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) networks. Numerical simulations show that using a combination of two RF nodes

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/6972151/file/6972165.pdf

Hans De Clercq

Papers

Personal distributed exposimeter for radio frequency exposure assessment in real environments.

Textile Integrated Breathing and ECG Monitoring System

Robust monitoring of vital signs integrated in textile

On-body calibration and measurements using a personal, distributed exposimeter for wireless fidelity.

A Neonatal Body Sensor Network for Long-term Vital Signs Acquisition☆