Smartwatch helps detects lung cancer: Using personal technology to advance healthcare

Summary The prevalence of smartwatches and other wearable medical technology has been increasing yearly. These watches offer a sensitive tool for capturing cardiac dysrhythmias and can lead to patients seeking earlier medical advice. This case report highlights the importance of clinicians seeking and using the information provided by wearable medical technology which in this case resulted in both the timely treatment of non-sustained ventricular tachycardia and lung adenocarcinoma.

The Internet of Things From a Legal Perspective

The internet of things (IoT) is one of successive technological waves that could have great impact on different aspects of modern life. It is being used in transport, smart grids, healthcare, environmental monitoring, logistics, as well as for processing pure personal data through a fitness tracker, wearable medical device, smartwatch, smart clothing, wearable camera, and so forth. From a legal viewpoint, processing personal data has to be done in accordance with rules of data protection law. This law aims to protect data from collection to retention. It usually applies to the processing of personal data that identifies or can identify a specific natural person. Strict adherence to this law is necessary for protecting personal data from being misused and also for promoting the IoT industry. This chapter discusses the applicability of the data protection law to IoT and the consequences of non-compliance with this law. It also provides recommendations on how to effectively comply with the data protection law in the IoT environment.

Multifunctional Flexible and Wearable Sensing System Based on Optical Microfiber Interferometry

Optical segments based flexible systems are the key for the development of futuristic advanced wearable devices for health monitoring, robotics, and ultraprecision positioning in industrial applications. Here, we have demonstrated an processed optical microfiber based multifunctional sensing system, which overcomes the various limitations of most widely reported electronics and material-based flexible devices. By optimizing the position of the post processed microfiber configuration in optimized Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) thickness and controlling the interference between the fundamental mode and higher order modes of microfiber to form and tunable interference pattern, we are able to make an efficient, simple, flexible and economical optical wearable vector bending system with a sensitivity as high as 1.01nm/degree. In addition, this skinmountable sensing sensor shows a remarkable and ultrasensitivity of -3.07 nm/oC. This ultrahigh sensitivity, mechanical robustness, with the excellent flexible and biocompatible nature also makes this sensing system a dominant candidate for wearable medical devices for elder-care facilities, physioclogical monitoring, athletic training, and rehabilitation program.

An Automatic Method to Reduce Baseline Wander and Motion Artifacts on Ambulatory Electrocardiogram Signals

Today’s wearable medical devices are becoming popular because of their price and ease of use. Most wearable medical devices allow users to continuously collect and check their health data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG). Therefore, many of these devices have been used to monitor patients with potential heart pathology as they perform their daily activities. However, one major challenge of collecting heart data using mobile ECG is baseline wander and motion artifacts created by the patient’s daily activities, resulting in false diagnoses. This paper proposes a new algorithm that automatically removes the baseline wander and suppresses most motion artifacts in mobile ECG recordings. This algorithm clearly shows a significant improvement compared to the conventional noise removal method. Two signal quality metrics are used to compare a reference ECG with its noisy version: correlation coefficients and mean squared error. For both metrics, the experimental results demonstrate that the noisy signal filtered by our algorithm is improved by a factor of ten.

Dual-band all textile antenna with AMC for heartbeat monitor and pacemaker control applications

All textile integrated dual-band monopole antenna with an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) is proposed. The proposed design operates at 2.4 and 5.8 GHz for wearable medical applications to monitor the heartbeat. A flexible and low-profile E- shaped CPW dual-band textile antenna is integrated with a 4 × 4 dual-band textile AMC reflector to enhance the gain and specific absorption rate (SAR). The SAR is reduced by nearly 95% at both 1 and 10 g. The design was measured on the body with a 2 mm separation. The simulated and measured results appear in high agreement in the case of with and without AMC array integration. The measurement was performed in the indoor environment and in an anechoic chamber to validate the design based on reflection coefficient and radiation pattern measurements.