In recent years, many technologies for gait and posture assessments have emerged. Wearable sensors, active and passive in-house monitors, and many combinations thereof all promise to provide accurate measures of physical activity, gait, and posture parameters. Motivated by market projections for wearable technologies and driven by recent technological innovations in wearable sensors (MEMs, electronic textiles, wireless communications, etc.), wearable health/performance research is growing rapidly and has the potential to transform future healthcare from disease treatment to disease prevention. The objective of this Special Issue is to address and disseminate the latest gait, posture, and activity monitoring systems as well as various mathematical models/methods that characterize mobility functions. This Special Issue focuses on wearable monitoring systems and physical sensors, and its mathematical models can be utilized in varied environments under varied conditions to monitor health and performance

In recent years, many technologies for gait and posture assessments have emerged. Wearable sensors, active and passive in-house monitors, and many combinations thereof all promise to provide accurate measures of physical activity, gait, and posture parameters. Motivated by market projections for wearable technologies and driven by recent technological innovations in wearable sensors (MEMs, electronic textiles, wireless communications, etc.), wearable health/performance research is growing rapidly and has the potential to transform future healthcare from disease treatment to disease prevention. The objective of this Special Issue is to address and disseminate the latest gait, posture, and activity monitoring systems as well as various mathematical models/methods that characterize mobility functions. This Special Issue focuses on wearable monitoring systems and physical sensors, and its mathematical models can be utilized in varied environments under varied conditions to monitor health and performance

In recent years, many technologies for gait and posture assessments have emerged. Wearable sensors, active and passive in-house monitors, and many combinations thereof all promise to provide accurate measures of physical activity, gait, and posture parameters. Motivated by market projections for wearable technologies and driven by recent technological innovations in wearable sensors (MEMs, electronic textiles, wireless communications, etc.), wearable health/performance research is growing rapidly and has the potential to transform future healthcare from disease treatment to disease prevention. The objective of this Special Issue is to address and disseminate the latest gait, posture, and activity monitoring systems as well as various mathematical models/methods that characterize mobility functions. This Special Issue focuses on wearable monitoring systems and physical sensors, and its mathematical models can be utilized in varied environments under varied conditions to monitor health and performance

In recent years, many technologies for gait and posture assessments have emerged. Wearable sensors, active and passive in-house monitors, and many combinations thereof all promise to provide accurate measures of physical activity, gait, and posture parameters. Motivated by market projections for wearable technologies and driven by recent technological innovations in wearable sensors (MEMs, electronic textiles, wireless communications, etc.), wearable health/performance research is growing rapidly and has the potential to transform future healthcare from disease treatment to disease prevention. The objective of this Special Issue is to address and disseminate the latest gait, posture, and activity monitoring systems as well as various mathematical models/methods that characterize mobility functions. This Special Issue focuses on wearable monitoring systems and physical sensors, and its mathematical models can be utilized in varied environments under varied conditions to monitor health and performance.

The pervasive healthcare system focus towards achieving two specific goals: the availability of eHealth applications and medical information anywhere and anytime and the invisibility of computing. Furthermore, pervasive health system encompasses new types of sensing and communication of health information as well as new type of interactions among health providers and people, among patients, among patients and researchers and patients and corporations. This book aims at promoting the discussion on current trends in technologies and concepts that help integrate health monitoring and healthcare more seamlessly to our everyday lives, regardless of space and time, but also present cutting edge perspectives and visions to highlight future development. The book presents not only the state of the art technologies and solutions to tackle the critical challenges faced by the building and development of the pervasive health system but also potential impact on society at social, medical and technological level.

Remote health monitoring using wearable sensors is an important research area involving several key steps: physiological parameter sensing and data acquisition, data analysis, data security, data transmission to caregivers, and clinical intervention, all of which play a significant role to form a closed loop system. Subject-specific behavioral and clinical traits, coupled with individual physiological differences, necessitate a personalized healthcare delivery model for around-the-clock monitoring within the home environment. Cardiovascular disease monitoring is an illustrative application domain where research has been instrumental in enabling a personalized closed-loop monitoring system, which has been showcased in this book. Health Monitoring Systems: An Enabling Technology for Patient Care provides a holistic overview of state-of-the-art monitoring systems facilitated by Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The book lists out the details on biomedical signal acquisition, processing, and data security, the fundamental building blocks towards an ambulatory health monitoring infrastructure. The fundamentals have been complimented with other relevant topics including applications which provide an in-depth view on remote health monitoring systems. Key Features: Presents examples of state-of-the-art health monitoring systems using IoT infrastructure Covers the full spectrum of physiological sensing, data acquisition, processing, and data security Provides relevant example applications demonstrating the benefits of technological advancements aiding disease prognosis This book serves as a beginner’s guide for engineering students of electrical and computer science, practicing engineers, researchers, and scientists who are interested in having an overview of pervasive health monitoring systems using body-worn sensors operating outside the hospital environment. It could also be recommended as a reference for a graduate or master’s level course on biomedical instrumentation and signal processing.

This book covers the results of a study concerning systems for healthcare-oriented monitoring of elderly persons. It is focused on the methods for processing data from impulse-radar sensors and depth sensors, aimed at localisation of monitored persons and estimation of selected quantities informative from the healthcare point of view. It includes mathematical descriptions of the considered methods, as well as the corresponding algorithms and the results of their testing in a real-world context. Moreover, it explains the motivations for developing healthcare-oriented monitoring systems and specifies the real-world needs which may be addressed by such systems. The healthcare systems, all over the world, are confronted with challenges implied by the ageing of population and the lack of adequate recruitment of healthcare professionals. Those challenges can be met by developing new technologies aimed at improving the quality of life of elderly people and at increasing the efficiency of public health management. Monitoring systems may contribute to this strategy by providing information on the evolving health status of independently-living elderly persons, enabling healthcare personnel to quickly react to dangerous events. Although these facts are generally acknowledged, such systems are not yet being commonly used in healthcare facilities and households. This may be explained by the difficulties related to the development of technological solutions which can be both acceptable for monitored persons and capable of providing healthcare personnel with useful information. The impulse-radar sensors and depth sensors, considered in this book, have a potential for overcoming those difficulties since they are not cumbersome for the monitored persons – if compared to wearable sensors – and do not violate the monitored person's privacy – if compared to video cameras. Since for safety reasons the level of power, emitted by the radar sensors, must be ultra-low, the task of detection and processing of signals is a research challenge which requires more sophisticated methods than those developed for other radar applications. This book contains descriptions of new Bayesian methods, applicable for the localisation of persons by means of impulse-radar sensors, and an exhaustive review of previously published ones. Furthermore, the methods for denoising, regularised numerical differentiation and fusion of data from impulse-radar sensors and depth sensors are systematically reviewed in this book. On top of that, the results of experiments aimed at comparing the performance of various data-processing methods, which may serve as guidelines for related future projects, are presented.