'VITAL SIGNS does for the environment what stock market indicators do for the City. But it says more about the future of our world than the FTSE ever can ' BBC Wildlife Magazine 'VITAL SIGNS is a sharply focused snapshot of the world Ideal for dipping into it makes fascinating reading ' New Agriculturalist 'The scope of the book is vast ... the presentation is clean and seamless ' Humanitarian Affairs Review 'An enlightening insight into the relationship between the environment and human activity ' Green Futures VITAL SIGNS 20052006 provides up-to-the-minute information on global warming, population growth, military spending, HIV/AIDS, economic equity, the trade in drugs and a whole range of other environmental, developmental, social, political and economic issues. By distilling 25 'vital signs' of our times from thousands of governmental, industrial and scientific sources, this book allows reader s to track key indicators that show our progress in issues that too often escape the attention of the news media, world leader s and economic experts . Each theme is presented in both text and two colour graphics, providing a thorough, well-documented and very accessible over view.

What we make and buy is a major indicator of society’s collective priorities. Among twenty-four key trends, Vital Signs Volume 22 explores significant global patterns in production and consumption. The result is a fascinating snapshot of how we invest our resources and the implications for the world’s well-being. The book examines developments in six main areas: energy, environment and climate, transportation, food and agriculture, global economy and resources, and population and society. Readers will learn how aquaculture is making gains on wild fish catches, where high speed rail is accelerating, why plastic production is on the rise, who is escaping chronic hunger, and who is still suffering. Researchers at the Worldwatch Institute not only provide the most up-to-date statistics, but put them in context. The analysis in Vital Signs teaches us both about our current priorities and how they could be shaped to create a better future.

The award-winning Worldwatch Institute reveals the often overlooked key trends that tell the true health of our planet.

First Published in 2009. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Vital signs, such as heart rate and respiration rate, are useful to health monitoring because they can provide important physiological insights for medical diagnosis and well-being management. Most traditional methods for measuring vital signs require a person to wear biomedical devices, such as a capnometer, a pulse oximeter, or an electrocardiogram sensor. These contact-based technologies are inconvenient, cumbersome, and uncomfortable to use. There is a compelling need for technologies that enable contact-free, easily deployable, and long-term monitoring of vital signs for healthcare. Contactless Vital Signs Monitoring presents a systematic and in-depth review on the principles, methodologies, and opportunities of using different wavelengths of an electromagnetic spectrum to measure vital signs from the human face and body contactlessly. The volume brings together pioneering researchers active in the field to report the latest progress made, in an intensive and structured way. It also presents various healthcare applications using camera and radio frequency-based monitoring, from clinical care to home care, to sport training and automotive, such as patient/neonatal monitoring in intensive care units, general wards, emergency department triage, MR/CT cardiac and respiratory gating, sleep centers, baby/elderly care, fitness cardio training, driver monitoring in automotive settings, and more. This book will be an important educational source for biomedical researchers, AI healthcare researchers, computer vision researchers, wireless-sensing researchers, doctors/clinicians, physicians/psychologists, and medical equipment manufacturers. - Includes various contactless vital signs monitoring techniques, such as optical-based, radar-based, WiFi-based, RFID-based, and acoustic-based methods. - Presents a thorough introduction to the measurement principles, methodologies, healthcare applications, hardware set-ups, and systems for contactless measurement of vital signs using camera or RF sensors. - Presents the opportunities for the fusion of camera and RF sensors for contactless vital signs monitoring and healthcare.

Just as people schedule regular check-ups with physicians, our planet needs regular check-ups to catch issues as early as possible, before they become more serious and harder to heal. That is the much-needed service provided on a global scale by the Worldwatch Institute in this new book, Vital Signs 2012. By taking stock of global consumption, Vital Signs 2012 offers the facts that need to guide our stewardship of the Earth's resources-and some of these facts are shocking. The report covers topics from obesity to ecosystem services, from grain production to nuclear power. Taken as a whole, it paints a picture of skyrocketing population, disappearing forests, and increasing consumption peppered with bright spots like growing investment in high-speed trains and other efficient transportation systems. Vital Signs 2012 is based on Worldwatch's online project of the same name, which provides up-to-date figures on important global concerns, as well as the Institute's own additional research. The book compiles the most important of these into an accessible, informative resource for policymakers and anyone who wants a realistic look at the state of our planet.

This year's Human Development Report explains why we have less than a decade to change course and start living within our global carbon budget, and how climate change will create long-run low human development traps, pushing vulnerable people into a downward spiral of deprivation.