Abstract/Summary

Medical science has taken great steps to enable us to live longer and healthier lives. While hospitals are vital for intervention-based healthcare, hospital care is expensive, increasing in cost, and with the continual increase in the global elderly population, we need solutions to enable people to stay healthy. While smart home technology solutions are enabling people to live in their homes for longer, research has shown that more personalized data are needed to improve services and decisions, and this is where wearable devices are proving their worth. Sensors can be placed on and around the body, in clothing, in shoes, in jewelry, and in many other accessories to measure movement, physiology, environment, and even mood/emotion. Such technology will become more common, and indeed vital, in long-term health monitoring. Perhaps the real potential of such devices is not just to monitor, but to have interactive communication with cloud services to offer personalized and ongoing real-time healthcare advice, enabling people to manage their health and to reduce hospital admissions. Therefore, the challenge of the next generation of wearable healthcare devices is to offer a wide range of sensing, computing, communication, and human–computer interactions, all within a tiny device with limited resources and electrical power