Applications of Body Worn Sensors and Wearables

Dear Colleagues,

Various aspects of the economic burden of many healthcare systems in both developed and developing countries are associated with an aging population, in which 70% will need some kind of long-term care. This, of course, is exacerbated by the fact that our population continues to age and live longer. For instance, it is estimated that in the USA alone, more than 10,000 Americans reach Medicare age every day, some of whom will develop multiple chronic conditions and account for a large share of Medicare spending. Management of chronic diseases requires patient behavior change, and thus, a greater emphasis must be placed on the patient’s central and active role. This constitutes an important shift in current clinical practice. At present, systems relegate the patient to the role of a passive recipient of care, thereby missing the opportunity to leverage what they can do to promote personal health. Healthcare for chronic conditions must be reoriented around the patient and caregivers. In addition, more emphasis should be allocated to self-managed prevention at individual level.

The COVID-19 pandemic also exposes our health care system’s weaknesses. For instance, this outbreak shows that traditional healthcare delivery models for managing chronic illness are not at scale to handle situations like the global COVID-19 crisis. Because people with chronic illness and older adults represent fragile populations, it is recommended to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions to reduce the risk of COVID-19 exposure in the hospital. This is disrupting the best practices for preventive or timely care for older adults and those with chronic illness.

The widespread uptake and acceptance of technology represents an opportunity to address this rising challenge. In particular, thanks to advances in wearables and digital health technologies, this is an opportunity to empower patients and/or their caregivers to be engaged as a part of the healthcare ecosystem. However, there are still fundamental gaps in adopting such technologies for the management of chronic illness and preventive care. For instance, while advanced signal processing, artificial intelligence, and remote monitoring have transformed the landscape of digital health industries, it is still unclear what clinically meaningful information could be extracted from these technologies to enable healthcare professionals to provide personalized care, empower patients to take care of their own health, deliver care remotely, and assist caregivers in effectively coordinating care.

This Special Issue is focused on applications of wearables, digital health, and data analytics to facilitate management of chronic conditions or preventive care. Some examples of these applications could be new studies that utilize sensors to extract digital biomarkers associated with cognitive decline, motor capacity deterioration because of specific conditions (e.g., dementia, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes), technologies to improve care management for those suffering from chronic conditions (e.g., chronic pain), sensors to improve patient adherence, sensors to better monitor sleep and stress, sensors for remotely monitoring health and wellbeing, sensors to facilitate tracking symptoms related to COVID-19, and sensors to manage environmental conditions that may impact health and wellbeing, such as humidity, temperature, light, CO2, etc. Also of interest are advanced data analytics developed to extract meaningful information from raw sensor data, fuse multimodal data, quantify interaction between physiological systems (e.g., cardiorespiratory and motor systems, emotion/cognition and motor systems), quantify and visualize the pattern of individuals’ behavior in the context of everyday life, and to identify early signs of infection (e.g., COVID-19) and healthy recovery post treatment (e.g., post COVID recovery, post hospital discharge recovery, etc.)

Prof. Dr. Bijan Najafi
Guest Editor

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