Wearable Technologies for Digital Health: Sensors, Analytics, and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

The landscape of digital health is being rapidly reshaped by advances in wearable technologies that are capable of continuously capturing physiological, behavioral, and environmental data in real time. These devices, which range from smartwatches and biosensing textiles to implantable and skin-adhesive sensors, offer unprecedented opportunities to monitor health, predict disease trajectories, personalize interventions, and extend care beyond clinic walls. As healthcare systems increasingly adopt data-driven and patient-centered models, wearable technologies have emerged as indispensable tools for precision medicine, remote patient monitoring, neuromodulation, rehabilitation, chronic disease management, and population-level analytics.

This Special Issue, “Wearable Technologies for Digital Health: Sensors, Analytics, and Applications”, aims to bring together cutting-edge research and insightful review articles that explore how wearable devices generate actionable health insights, enhance clinical decision-making, and accelerate innovation in biomedical data science. The scope aligns closely with BDCC’s mission to advance big data analytics, computational methods, and the cyber–physical infrastructure essential for next-generation digital health systems.

We invite submissions that address methodological advances, data-centric approaches, novel clinical applications, validation studies, interoperability frameworks, and ethical implications of wearable technologies. Interdisciplinary work spanning engineering, computer science, medicine, public health, data science, and human–computer interaction is especially welcome.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Wearable sensor platforms for continuous physiological monitoring.
• Machine learning and AI methods for processing multimodal wearable data.
• Digital biomarkers and predictive analytics for chronic disease.
• Wearables in rehabilitation, neuromodulation, and musculoskeletal medicine.
• Remote patient monitoring and at-home clinical trials.
• Edge computing, signal processing, and algorithm development.
• Wearables for mental health, behavioral health, and fatigue monitoring.
• Wearables addressing health disparities and improving equity in access.
• Privacy, security, and ethical considerations of pervasive sensing.
• Integration of wearables with mobile health (mHealth), EHRs, and IoT ecosystems.

This Special Issue welcomes the submission of original research, systematic reviews, scoping reviews, technical reports, and perspective pieces that will advance the science and applications of wearable technologies for digital health.

We look forward to receiving your contributions and curating a Special Issue that will advance the global conversation on how wearable technologies can transform healthcare delivery and health outcomes.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in BioMedInformatics.

Dr. Charles A. Odonkor
Dr. James S. Khan
Dr. Bian Yang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Big Data and Cognitive Computing is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.