A Review of Commercial and Medical-Grade Physiological Monitoring Devices for Biofeedback-Assisted Quality of Life Improvement Studies

Abstract

With the rise in wearable technology and "health culture", we are seeing an increasing interest and affordances in studying how to not only prolong life expectancy but also in how to improve individuals' quality of life. On the one hand, this attempts to give meaning to the increasing life expectancy, as living above a certain threshold of pain and lack of autonomy or mobility is both degrading and unfair. On the other hand, it lowers the cost of continuous care, as individuals with high quality of life indexes tend to have lower hospital readmissions or secondary complications, not to mention higher physical and mental health. In this paper, we evaluate the current state of the art in physiological therapy (biofeedback) along with the existing medical grade and consumer grade hardware for physiological research. We provide a quick primer on the most commonly monitored physiologic metrics, as well as a brief discussion on the current state of the art in biofeedback-assisted medical applications. We then go on to present a comparative analysis between medical and consumer grade biofeedback devices and discuss the hardware specifications and potential practical applications of each consumer grade device in terms of functionality and adaptability for controlled (laboratory) and uncontrolled (field) studies. We end this article with some empirical observations based on our study so that readers might use take them into consideration when arranging a laboratory or real-world experience, thus avoiding costly time delays and material expenditures.

Effect of Training With Feedback on Static and Dynamic Balance in Students With Health Limitations

“…2, pp. 125-132 В настоящее время наиболее перспективным неинвазивным методом реабилитации является метод биологической обратной связи [5,17]. Использование данного метода в рамках занятий по физической культуре позволит провести коррекционные мероприятия восстановления двигательных навыков и создание особого адаптационного двигательного стереотипа [12,13], а также улучшения психоэмоционального состояния студентов как со скрытой, так и с явной патологией, что впоследствии улучшит как двигательную, так и социальную адаптацию [7,16].…”

Information System for Monitoring and Assessing Stress Among Medical Students

“…This application, specially developed for this project, was implemented in Android on a Samsung Galaxy 3/5 phone and received data from the wearable device -Microsoft Smartband 2. This Smartband evaluates skin conductance, body temperature, heart rate variability, calorie intake and expenditure, sleep patterns, and quality [20]. All of these data was sent to the mobile application via Bluetooth.…”

EDDAMAP: efficient data-dependent approach for monitoring asymptomatic patient

“…Usually, the monitoring is done by recording the whereabouts of the patients as well as their routine activities [2,3], such as a visit to health centre, theatre, tourist attraction, market, shopping mall, restaurants, and other public facilities and functions. Moreover, nowadays, the activity records [4,5] of patients have become very useful in public healthcare settings for management purposes. This is because the activity records can be used for planning and decision making.…”

“…Also, El-Sappagh el al [7] prove how easier it is to track the fitness of patients using sensor data. Notwithstanding, Or et al [14] propose that most of the modern health information systems have under-explored design technique challenges [5]. Moreover, Rajkumar et al [15] propose an improved software intelligent system towards enhancing the performance of a hearing impairment system to provide a solution to audiological problems.…”

“…For instance, it is important to obtain a prior knowledge on the initial health status of the AP follow by monitoring the activities of the AP as the stance of the present paper. Furthermore, Nogueira et al [5] propose a biofeedback system technology that can be used to evaluate the quality of life of patients. Whereas Crepaldi et al [1] evaluate health information systems based on software engineering metrics by emphasising on the system methods and designs and further propose that a lot of the existing approaches for managing the health records of patients are not efficient as a result of overuse of resources.…”