Recent advances in the Medical Internet of Things (MIoT)
and big
data enable a prospering platform for pervasive healthcare and facilitate
the transformation from hospital-centered to human-centered healthcare.
Wearable devices as human interfaces provide first-hand data and real-time
monitoring, which are key technologies in the MIoT. Several remarkable
surveys have been conducted to summarize the recent progress in wearable
sensors and systems for the MIoT and pervasive medicine. However,
few have focused on wearable optical sensing (WOS) technologies, which
is an emerging sensing modality in wearable devices. WOS can achieve
high precision, high compatibility, high anti-interference, and low
motion artifacts for human vital signal acquisition, which are particularly
useful in special scenarios such as intensive care units (ICUs). These
technologies can also be integrated with smart fabrics or mobile computing
for out-of-hospital healthcare. This work provides the first literature
review of WOS for pervasive medicine. We aim to systematically summarize
the emerging WOS technologies in the MIoT for disease diagnosis and
health monitoring. Specifically, this review covers the technical
bases and design principles of major WOS technologies and their application
domains for monitoring and treatment. We also discuss the opportunities
and challenges, especially in the COVID-19 outbreak.