A Systematic Review of Wearable Patient Monitoring Systems – Current Challenges and Opportunities for Clinical Adoption

Abstract

The aim of this review is to investigate barriers and challenges of wearable patient monitoring (WPM) solutions adopted by clinicians in acute, as well as in community, care settings. Currently, healthcare providers are coping with ever-growing healthcare challenges including an ageing population, chronic diseases, the cost of hospitalization, and the risk of medical errors. WPM systems are a potential solution for addressing some of these challenges by enabling advanced sensors, wearable technology, and secure and effective communication platforms between the clinicians and patients. A total of 791 articles were screened and 20 were selected for this review. The most common publication venue was conference proceedings (13, 54%). This review only considered recent studies published between 2015 and 2017. The identified studies involved chronic conditions (6, 30%), rehabilitation (7, 35%), cardiovascular diseases (4, 20%), falls (2, 10%) and mental health (1, 5%). Most studies focussed on the system aspects of WPM solutions including advanced sensors, wireless data collection, communication platform and clinical usability based on a specific area or disease. The current studies are progressing with localized sensor-software integration to solve a specific use-case/health area using non-scalable and 'silo' solutions. There is further work required regarding interoperability and clinical acceptance challenges. The advancement of wearable technology and possibilities of using machine learning and artificial intelligence in healthcare is a concept that has been investigated by many studies. We believe future patient monitoring and medical treatments will build upon efficient and affordable solutions of wearable technology.

Integration of Wearable Smart Sensor for Improving e-Healthcare

“…The Brownian particle would diffuse according to a simple (1). Using this concept, displacement of the particle in molecular communication D is given as Vol.…”

“…In most of the e-healthcare application, smart sensors which are the advanced version of the absorbing (receiving), storing and transmitting device or machine, can be utilized in many different cases such as monitoring patients' continuous fitness. Thus, we studied the integration of wearable sensors for monitoring patients [1]. A comprehensive understanding of the MIMO wireless network provides us for establishing the wireless body area network, and the way in which information of the wrist, knee, and ankle could be used to improve patient care via wearable sensors [2].…”

Analytics and Telehealth Emerging Technologies: The Path Forward for Smart Primary Care Environment

“…The high cost of implementing wearable systems that enable data sensing in a large scale is also an open challenge. More of developments in wearable technologies for telehealth and associated challenges for clinical adoption are presented in [9,11,12].…”

Intelligent health monitoring system based on smart clothing

“…10,11 Great progress has been made in the field of intelligent care. [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] Yao et al 17 developed a low-cost interrogation system that was able to dynamically interrogate the antenna sensor and wirelessly transmit the acquired data to a smart device. Sundaravadivel et al 18 introduced a piezo-electric-based accelerometer sensor design which helped in tracking the physical activities of family and friends.…”