Smart Devices and Wearable Sensors: Recent Advances and Prospects

Dear Colleagues,

The ongoing advancement of wearable sensors and smart devices is reshaping modern healthcare, human activity monitoring, and personal wellness through increasingly sophisticated, miniaturized, and connected technologies. These devices, often integrated within the broader Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, enable seamless acquisition and transmission of biosignals and contextual data in real-time. Ranging from heart rate and electrodermal activity to motion tracking and environmental sensing, wearable systems are capable of capturing high-resolution, multimodal data that underpin novel insights into human physiology and behavior.

Mobile health (mHealth) applications are benefiting significantly from these technological developments, providing scalable, personalized, and often remote solutions for health monitoring and disease management. Remote monitoring capabilities—ranging from post-operative rehabilitation and chronic disease surveillance to eldercare and mental health tracking—are facilitating proactive and preventive healthcare models. These solutions are particularly critical in underserved or geographically isolated communities, where access to traditional healthcare services is limited.

Human activity recognition (HAR), powered by embedded inertial sensors and enhanced through artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, is enabling precise classification of daily activities and detection of anomalies related to health conditions, fatigue, or performance decline. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms are increasingly integrated within wearable systems for tasks such as biosignal analysis, early diagnosis, and behavioral modeling, driving forward the vision of intelligent, adaptive, and context-aware health technologies.

Personalized medicine stands to benefit enormously from smart sensing platforms, as continuous and individualized data streams enable tailored interventions and adaptive therapeutic strategies. Sensor fusion techniques, combining data from multiple sources (e.g., accelerometers, ECG, PPG, and GPS), are essential for improving the reliability, accuracy, and robustness of health-related insights.

Despite these promising advances, several challenges remain. Ensuring data privacy and security, optimizing energy efficiency for prolonged device autonomy, enhancing user compliance and wearability, and validating the clinical reliability of sensor-based assessments are crucial areas of ongoing research. Interdisciplinary collaboration—bridging engineering, computer science, medicine, and behavioral sciences—is essential to address these multifaceted issues.

This Special Issue aims to serve as a comprehensive platform for disseminating the latest research and developments in fields of wearable sensors and smart devices, with a focus on their integration into real-world healthcare and monitoring systems. We welcome contributions that highlight technological innovations, novel applications, algorithmic approaches, and cross-sector collaborations, with the ultimate goal of advancing the field toward more intelligent, accessible, and impactful solutions in health and human performance.

We look forward to your contributions.

Dr. Iqram Hussain
Dr. Francesco Di Rienzo
Dr. Jahowa Islam
Guest Editors

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• wearable sensors
• smart devices
• mobile health
• remote monitoring
• internet of things (IoT)
• human activity recognition
• biosignal acquisition
• artificial intelligence in healthcare
• personalized medicine
• sensor fusion