Literature review on wearable sensors

Hello! Welcome to the second week of the course. I’m Dr. Shabbir Syed Abdul, an assistant professor in health informatics at graduate institute of bio-medical informatics, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan. This week I will be discussing the results we got from the literature review of wearable devices, specially in clinical settings.

Innovations in the electronic healthcare are transforming the participation of physicians and patients in the modern healthcare system. Wearable devices can be integrated into routine care of acute and chronic disease management and provides essential information for proactive management to both healthcare providers and users. Studies show that a well informed patient improves quality of life and patient outcome because they are more likely to participate in healthy behavior changes. Sensors, mobile devices, and later technologies are presenting new opportunities and risk for healthcare providers. The internet of things is about interconnecting embedded systems. It brings together two evolving technologies that is wireless connectivity and smart sensors.

This study emphasizes upon the clinical relevance of wearable devices and also the opportunities and challenges using wearable devices. Sensors allow patients to self monitor, track, and assess human physiological data, while also providing an interface and dashboard for the healthcare providers aiding to monitor a group of patients. These sensors are easily managed and are becoming increasingly accurate and reliable for patient care. With the advent of health internet of things, more devices are being used in healthcare for tele-monitoring for elderly patients. The increasing use of wearable devices is encouraging more research and development of variables and health Internet of Things. Which is beneficial for patient, doctors… and doctors.

For example, doctors can be alert in real time when there is change in vital signs like heart rate, arrhythmias, in the cardiac patients. This would be able..and the physicians can be able to intervene before a more serious complication arises and there by improves patient safety and quality of care. This study explores the clinically relevant wearable devices that available for the research report on this topic which helps in early detection and prevention of long term care and monitoring of patients. The objective of this review is to explore the advancement and the real clinical usefulness by reviewing our available scientific research on wearable devices. We did a comprehensive search within the databases like PubMed, MDPI, Sage, and Scopus.

Articles published between 2011 to 2015 were included. Inclusion and exclusion criteria is shown in the slide. Keywords used for searchs were “wearable devices” , “wearable sensors” , “internet of things” , “health internet of things.” We got about 5,000 articles. However, after excluding duplications and screening for titles we selected about 510 articles for further analysis. After screening of abstract, 194 articles met the “inclusion” criteria. However, after reading the full text, we got 71 articles that included in the study. As shown in the slide, the number of articles selected from each database we have searched As you see, table 2, it shows the number of studies we have selected from each database are in various categories of devices.

And we had like 5 different various type of devices. For example, motion means wearable sensors and devices which estimate the mobility of the patient. And vital signs means monitoring systems generally include more parameters such as heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiration rate. Multiple parameters means monitoring more than one parameter using single device like motion monitoring, and plus vitals such as heart rate. And some sensors are able to monitor multiple parameters. While also in the “others” category, we included devices measuring salivary yuric acid, biochemistry of sweat, swallowing ability, blood glucose, etc.