Wearable, Non-Contact and Capacitive Sensing for Biomedical and Industrial Applications
A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Wearables".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2026 | Viewed by 156
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The growing burden of chronic diseases, aging populations, and the demand for personalized medicine are reshaping healthcare delivery. Simultaneously, industrial sectors are undergoing their own transformation, driven by the need for continuous, non-invasive monitoring of workers, equipment, and processes in safety-critical and high-performance environments. Traditional measurement paradigms (reliant on invasive and/or contact measurements, periodic assessments, and bulky instrumentation) are increasingly inadequate for the real-time, unobtrusive sensing that both modern medicine and industry demand.
Non-contact and capacitive sensing technologies offer a compelling answer to both challenges, enabling robust physiological and physical measurement without direct skin or surface contact. This improves patient comfort and compliance in clinical and home settings, while simultaneously offering resilience, low power consumption, and ease of integration in industrial deployments such as human–machine interaction, occupational health monitoring, structural sensing, and process control. Wearable devices, the Internet of Medical and Industrial Things (IoMT/IIoT), and edge computing platforms have further accelerated this convergence, enabling continuous sensing to move beyond the clinic and factory floor into everyday environments.
Capacitive, inductive, and impedance-based methods are emerging as key enablers of this transition. Yet significant challenges remain across both domains: motion artifact reduction, miniaturization, energy efficiency, signal integrity in real-world conditions, and the seamless integration of sensing hardware with intelligent data processing pipelines. Addressing these challenges is critical to realizing the full potential of ubiquitous sensing in healthcare and industry alike.
This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate the most recent advances in wearable, non-contact, and capacitive sensing systems for biomedical and industrial monitoring and diagnostics. We welcome contributions addressing the design, development, and validation of novel sensing hardware, signal processing methodologies, and clinical or real-world applications that advance the state of the art in unobtrusive physiological and physical measurement.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Non-contact electrode design and capacitive sensing for biomedical and industrial applications;
- Wearable sensors for continuous physiological monitoring (ECG, EEG, EMG, respiration, etc.);
- Motion artifact detection, characterization, and reduction in wearable systems;
- Impedance spectroscopy and bioimpedance measurement techniques;
- Inductive and electromagnetic sensing for biomedical and industrial use;
- Signal processing and machine learning for wearable and non-contact sensor data;
- IoMT/IIoT architectures and edge computing for real-time monitoring;
- Flexible, stretchable, and textile-integrated sensing systems;
- Occupational health, human–machine interaction, and worker safety monitoring;
- Sensors for activity recognition, fall detection, and rehabilitation monitoring;
- Clinical and industrial validation and real-world deployment of non-contact monitoring systems.
Prof. Mario Cifrek, PhD
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- non-contact electrodes
- capacitive sensing
- bioimpedance
- wearable sensors
- industrial sensing
- motion artifact reduction
- edge computing
- IoMT
- remote patient monitoring
- ubiquitous healthcare
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