Wearable health monitoring systems

V. Custodio, F.J. Herrera, G. Lopez, J.I. Moreno, A review on architectures and communications technologies for wearable health-monitoring systems. Sensors (Basel) 12 (10) (2012) 13907-13946. 

Figure 12.1 Schematic structure and components of a wearable health-monitoring system.

LifeShirt (VivoMetrics Inc., Venmra, USA) is one of the initial models of wearable health-monitoring systems, introduced to the market in the early 2000s. The system includes a garment, a handheld device, and PC-based analysis software. 

R Paradise, G Loriga, and N Taccini, Wearable Health Care System for Vital Signs Monitoring , MEDICON 2004 Conference, Naples (Italy), 2004. 

E-textiles may be defined as textiles with electronic properties, and the markets for E-textiles are rapidly growing. An E-textile is an application built within a textile. E-textiles are finding their use in wearable technology, sports and fitness markets, medical and health monitoring systems, sleep apnea monitoring systems, antenna applications, space, military, infotainment, fashion, and others. Conductive tapes, webbings, fabrics, and 3D preforms are being used for E-textile applications. E-textile markets will soon be a billion dollar industry. 

E-textiles are being used in wearable technology, the sports and fitness market, health monitoring systems, sleep apnea monitoring systems, antenna applications, and space, defense, and military applications. 

J. Yao, S. Warren, Applying the ISO/IEEE 11073 standards to wearable home health monitoring systems, J. Clin. Monit. Comput. 19 (6) (December 2005) 427—436. 

Paradiso R, Loriga G, Taccini N. Wearable health care system for vital signs monitoring. In Mediterranean conference on medical and biological engineering 2004. 

Systems integrators have developed special expertise in the incorporation of components into textiles. Denmark-based Ohmatex, Italy s Smartex, and the Finnish firm Clothing+are such companies. Possible challenges in wearable health-monitoring... 

Pantelopoulos, A., Bourbakis, N.G., 2010. A survey on wearable sensor-based systems for health monitoring and prognosis. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybem. Part C Appl. Rev. 40 (1), 1-12. 

Researchers (North Carolina State University News, 2014) from North Carolina State University have developed a new, stretchable antenna that can be incorporated into wearable technologies, such as health monitoring devices. Many researchers— including our lab—have developed prototype sensors for wearable health systems, but there was a clear need to develop antennas that can be easily incorporated into those systems to transmit data from the sensors, so that patients can be monitored or diagnosed, says Dr. Yong Zhu, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace... 

In this chapter, biomedical sensors for wearable computing including their measur-and and measured parameters are discussed, and then the available techniques for the textile-based body sensor networks design are considered. In order to demonstrate the potential benefits of the textile-based wearable wireless body sensor networks, recent development in wireless vital signals monitoring systems based on loT for health care and fitness applications are reviewed. 

The possibility of creating a robust, low-cost microsystem enabled with the aforementioned capabilities and packed into one single device that manages to combine the so-called micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) with advanced electronic packaging technologies played a very important role for the development of such systems [23]. In addition, the large number of scenarios where wearables can contribute to increase the quality of everyday life, eg, health, physical exercise, or elder monitoring, has increased the attention and interest in the field. 

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