A survey on health monitoring systems for health smart homes

Abstract

Aging population ratios are rising significantly. Health monitoring systems (HMS) in smart environments have evolved rapidly to become a viable alternative to traditional healthcare solutions. The aim of HMS is to not only reduce costs but to also provide timely e-health services to individuals wishing to maintain their independence. In this way, elderly people can avoid, for as long as possible, any interaction with healthcare institutions (e.g. nursing homes and hospitals), which in turn reduces pressure on the health system. To fully realise this vision of seamless e-health services supporting people in need of them, a number of challenges that need further investigation still exist. To this end, we provide an overview of the current state of the art for smart health monitoring systems. We review HMS in smart environments from a general perspective and with a particular focus on systems for the elderly and dependent people. We look at the challenges for these systems from the perspective of developing the technology itself, system requirements, system design and modelling. We present a consolidated picture of the most important functions and services offered by HMS for monitoring and detecting human behaviour including its concepts, approaches, and processing techniques. Moreover, we provide an extensive, in-depth analysis and evaluation of the existing research findings in the area of e-health systems. Finally, we present challenges and open issues facing the smart HMS field and we make recommendations on how to improve future systems.

Smart cities survey: Technologies, application domains and challenges for the cities of the future

“…They identify the following main issues to overcome: (1) bionic smart cloth fabrication, (2) health big data, (3) control system design for multimodal body sensors, (4) intra-body area network communication, (5) impact of body human interference and (6) contextual data interpretation. Mshali et al 189 review the challenges of homes as a smart environment for health monitoring. They distinguish the following main issues: (1) monitoring accuracy, (2) context-awareness, (3) human factors, (4) heterogeneity, (5) availability and reliability, (6) data transmission, (7) security and privacy, (8) intrusiveness and (9) power consumption.…”

A Vision-Based System for Monitoring Elderly People at Home

“…Several surveys in the literature describe recent trends in smart homes aimed at assisted living systems [6][7][8][9]. These monitoring systems can use exclusively ambient sensors (i.e., RGB and/or infrared cameras) to limit user discomfort as much as possible [10][11][12], can use wearable sensors if health parameters need to be monitored [13], or can exploit different modalities at the same time [6][7][8].…”

Identifying Motives for Implementing eHealth by using Activity Theory

“…eHealth technology refers to various kinds of tools, divided into groups: (1) process-related eHealth technology, and (2) client-related eHealth technology. There are for example different personal alarm systems for people in their homes, attached to GSM phones, alternatively, alarm systems attached to the GPS-satellite system, which inform the nurses where the clients in need of help are, as well as health monitoring systems [41][42][43]. Cameras installed in the clients' homes could be used by home care teams for digital night surveillance.…”