Design and realization of a wireless sensor gateway for health monitoring

Sensors for Sustainable Smart Cities: A Review

Experts confirm that 85% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050. Therefore, cities should be prepared to satisfy the needs of their citizens and provide the best services. The idea of a city of the future is commonly represented by the smart city, which is a more efficient system that optimizes its resources and services, through the use of monitoring and communication technology. Thus, one of the steps towards sustainability for cities around the world is to make a transition into smart cities. Here, sensors play an important role in the system, as they gather relevant information from the city, citizens, and the corresponding communication networks that transfer the information in real-time. Although the use of these sensors is diverse, their application can be categorized in six different groups: energy, health, mobility, security, water, and waste management. Based on these groups, this review presents an analysis of different sensors that are typically used in efforts toward creating smart cities. Insights about different applications and communication systems are provided, as well as the main opportunities and challenges faced when making a transition to a smart city. Ultimately, this process is not only about smart urban infrastructure, but more importantly about how these new sensing capabilities and digitization developments improve quality of life. Smarter communities are those that socialize, adapt, and invest through transparent and inclusive community engagement in these technologies based on local and regional societal needs and values. Cyber security disruptions and privacy remain chief vulnerabilities.

Scoping Review of Healthcare Literature on Mobile, Wearable, and Textile Sensing Technology for Continuous Monitoring

Remote monitoring of health can reduce frequent hospitalisations, diminishing the burden on the healthcare system and cost to the community. Patient monitoring helps identify symptoms associated with diseases or disease-driven disorders, which makes it an essential element of medical diagnoses, clinical interventions, and rehabilitation treatments for severe medical conditions. This monitoring can be expensive and time-consuming and provide an incomplete picture of the state of the patient. In the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the adoption of mobile and wearable devices, along with the introduction of smart textile solutions that offer the possibility of continuous monitoring. These alternatives fuel a technology shift in healthcare, one that involves the continuous tracking and monitoring of individuals. This scoping review examines how mobile, wearable, and textile sensing technology have been permeating healthcare by offering alternate solutions to challenging issues, such as personalised prescriptions or home-based secondary prevention. To do so, we have selected 222 healthcare literature articles published from 2007 to 2019 and reviewed them following the PRISMA process under the schema of a scoping review framework. Overall, our findings show a recent increase in research on mobile sensing technology to address patient monitoring, reflected by 128 articles published in journals and 19 articles in conference proceedings between 2014 and 2019, which represents 57.65% and 8.55% respectively of all included articles.

M-BRIDGE: Wireless portable onbody aggregator and visualizer system for Wireless Body Sensor Network

Advances made in electronics, intelligent and wireless technologies enable individuals to self-observe their health states anywhere anytime. The shift in self care becomes a promising paradigm to alleviate burdens on centralized institutional care. As a result, Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) personal health solutions can be seen increasingly although medical community still has concerns on their usability and applicability. Especially, there is still lacking in portable wireless wearable gateway to integrate WBSN into existing healthcare solutions. To fulfill this gap, we design and develop MobilE on-Body aGgregator and vIsualizer Device (M-BRIDGE) system using Android smart phone. Our proposed solution fully supports the needs of flexible device interfacing, data aggregation, efficient data distribution and user-friendly visualization. We also explain how M-BRIDGE's unique features and operation can complement with and fulfill the deficiency of existing WBSN healthcare solutions. We finally present the details of implementation and technical evaluation as well as discussion on the potential issues and future works.