Wearable Technology in Healthcare and Sports: Advances and Novel Applications

Dear Colleagues, 

Wearable technology has become an integral component of modern healthcare and sports, offering unprecedented opportunities to monitor physical, physiological, and behavioral data in real-world settings. Beyond new hardware, transformative advances are increasingly emerging in how wearable data are processed, analyzed, and translated into actionable knowledge through computing and artificial intelligence. Integrating wearables into digital health ecosystems allows for continuous and remote monitoring, early event detection, and tailored interventions. The ability to capture long-term, real-world and person-specific data provides unique opportunities for predictive modeling, risk stratification, and decision-support tools that can guide practitioners in optimized and personalized treatments.

This Special Issue focuses on novel data-driven applications of wearable technology in healthcare and sports, highlighting the role of advanced data analytics, machine learning, and decision-support systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Continuous health monitoring;
• Disease prevention and management;
• Monitoring recovery and rehabilitation;
• Integration of wearables into digital health platforms;
• Athlete performance optimization;
• Privacy, data security, and ethical considerations in wearable data use;
• Validation studies in ecologically valid contexts;
• Large-scale deployment of wearables in population health studies.

Studies addressing challenges such as data quality, algorithm transparency, interpretability, and user-centered design are particularly encouraged. Manuscripts focused solely on hardware design, component engineering, or prototyping without data-driven evaluation fall outside the scope of this Special Issue. By bringing together contributions from clinical, athletic, and computational domains, this Special Issue aims to foster interdisciplinary insights into how wearable technology can enhance human well-being.

Prof. Dr. Jean-Marie Aerts
Guest Editor

Dr. Jasper Gielen
Guest Editor Assistant

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