Wearable devices have the potential to transform multiple facets of human life, including healthcare, activity monitoring, and interaction with computers. At the same time, a number of technical and adaption challenges hinder widespread and daily usage of wearable devices. Recent research efforts have focused on identifying these challenges and solving them such that the potential of wearable devices can be realized. In this monograph, the authors guide the reader through the state-of-the-art of wearable devices, detailing the challenges that researchers and designers face in achieving wide-adoption of the technology throughout society. The authors also identify the application areas where these devices are most likely to gain acceptance. They point the way to overcoming these challenges by detailing the recent advances in providing physically flexible designs, the energy management for such designs and finally consider some of the security and privacy aspects of wearable devices such that user compliance can be improved. This monograph serves as a comprehensive resource for challenges and solutions towards self-powered wearable devices for health and activity monitoring.

This book covers cutting edge advancements on self-powered Internet of Things, where sensing devices can be energy-positive while capturing context from the physical world. It provides new mechanisms for activity recognition without the need of conventional inertial sensors, which demand significant energy during their operation and thus quickly deplete the batteries of internet-of-things (IoT) devices. The book offers new solutions by employing energy harvesters as activity sensors as well as power sources to enable the autonomous and self-powered operation of IoT devices without the need of human intervention. It provides useful content for graduate students as well as researchers to understand the nascent technologies of human activity, fitness and health monitoring using autonomous sensors. In particular, this book is very useful for people working on pervasive computing, activity recognition, wearable IoT, fitness/healthcare and autonomous systems. This book covers a broad range of topics related to self-powered activity recognition. The main topics of this book include wearables, IoT, energy harvesting, energy harvesters as sensors, activity recognition and self-powered operation of IoT devices. This book starts with the introduction of wearable IoT devices and activity recognition and then highlights the conventional activity recognition mechanisms. After that, it describes the use of energy harvesters to power the IoT devices. Later, it explores the use of various energy harvesters as activity sensors. It also proposes the use of energy harvesters as simultaneous source of energy and context information and defines the emerging concept of energy-positive sensing compared to conventional energy-negative sensing. Finally, it explores sensor/signal fusion to enhance the performance using multiple energy harvesters and charts a way forward for future research in this area. This book covers all important and emerging topics that have significance in the design and implementation of autonomous wearable IoT devices. We believe that this book will lay the foundation for designing self-powered IoT devices which can ultimately replace the conventional wearable IoT devices which need regular recharging and replacement.

Self-powered wearable Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have made a significant impact on human life and health in recent years. These sensors are known for their convenience, durability, affordability, and longevity, leading to substantial improvements in people’s lives. This review summarizes the development of self-powered wearable IoT sensors in recent years. Materials for self-powered wearable sensors are summarized and evaluated, including nanomaterials, flexible materials, and degradable materials. The working mode of self-powered wearable IoT sensors is analyzed, and the different principles of its physical sensing and chemical sensing are explained. Several common technologies for self-powered wearable IoT sensors are presented, such as triboelectric technology, piezoelectric technology, and machine learning. The applications of self-powered IoT wearable sensors in human-machine interfaces are reviewed. Its current shortcomings and prospects for its future development are also discussed. To conduct this review, a comprehensive literature search was performed using several electronic databases, resulting in the inclusion of 225 articles. The gathered data was extracted, synthesized, and analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. This review provides a comprehensive analysis and summary of its working mode, technologies, and applications and provides references and inspiration for related research in this field. Furthermore, this review also identifies the key directions and challenges for future research.

Advances in technology have produced a range of on-body sensors and smartwatches that can be used to monitor a wearer’s health with the objective to keep the user healthy. However, the real potential of such devices not only lies in monitoring but also in interactive communication with expert-system-based cloud services to offer personalized and real-time healthcare advice that will enable the user to manage their health and, over time, to reduce expensive hospital admissions. To meet this goal, the research challenges for the next generation of wearable healthcare devices include the need to offer a wide range of sensing, computing, communication, and human–computer interaction methods, all within a tiny device with limited resources and electrical power. This Special Issue presents a collection of six papers on a wide range of research developments that highlight the specific challenges in creating the next generation of low-power wearable healthcare sensors.

This book provides a collection of comprehensive research articles on data analytics and applications of wearable devices in healthcare. This Special Issue presents 28 research studies from 137 authors representing 37 institutions from 19 countries. To facilitate the understanding of the research articles, we have organized the book to show various aspects covered in this field, such as eHealth, technology-integrated research, prediction models, rehabilitation studies, prototype systems, community health studies, ergonomics design systems, technology acceptance model evaluation studies, telemonitoring systems, warning systems, application of sensors in sports studies, clinical systems, feasibility studies, geographical location based systems, tracking systems, observational studies, risk assessment studies, human activity recognition systems, impact measurement systems, and a systematic review. We would like to take this opportunity to invite high quality research articles for our next Special Issue entitled “Digital Health and Smart Sensors for Better Management of Cancer and Chronic Diseases” as a part of Sensors journal.

The internet of things (IoT) has had a major impact on academic and industrial fields. Applying these technologies to healthcare systems reduces medical costs while enriching the patient-centric approach to medicine, allowing for better overall healthcare proficiency. However, usage of IoT in healthcare is still suffering from significant challenges with respect to the cost and accuracy of medical sensors, non-standard IoT system architectures, assorted wearable devices, the huge volume of generated data, and interoperability issues. Incorporating the Internet of Things in Healthcare Applications and Wearable Devices is an essential publication that examines existing challenges and provides solutions for building smart healthcare systems with the latest IoT-enabled technology and addresses how IoT improves the proficiency of healthcare with respect to wireless sensor networks. While highlighting topics including mobility management, sensor integration, and data analytics, this book is ideally designed for computer scientists, bioinformatics analysts, doctors, nurses, hospital executives, medical students, IT specialists, software developers, computer engineers, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on how these emerging wireless technologies improve efficiency within the healthcare domain.