Trends and New Advances on Wearable and Mobile Technologies for Parkinson's Disease Monitoring and Assessment of Motor Symptoms

The aim of this work is to analyze the trends and new advances carried out in the last decades in the field of Parkinson's disease monitoring and management and more specifically regarding wearable and mobile technologies. The challenges of such technologies is to monitor, to assess and to manage the full range of PD symptoms through monitoring and testing routines while not hampering the patient's daily activities, identifying the correlation between the different dimensions affecting the severity of symptoms and the evolution of the disease and enabling the clinician to manage more efficiently the patient by providing timely indications on the effectiveness of the therapy and suggestions on therapy changes.

A Forecast of the Adoption of Wearable Technology

This research aims to quantify the current market size for wearable technology, and determine why this market has struggled over the past decade. These are products which are worn on the body and enhanced using electronics. Forecasts have been made as to how this wearable technology is likely to develop in terms of market size and product design or function. It is predicted that in five years the wearable technology market will be several times larger than it is currently, and entertainment devices will overtake fitness to become the largest product category. Medical devices will be used to reduce healthcare costs by monitoring patients within their own home and wearable technology will allow businesses to improve customer relations and productivity.

Trends in Wearable Technologies for Earth Science

In this chapter, we discuss the need for wearable technologies for earth science field research, a discipline that can be both extremely physically rigorous and even potentially dangerous at times. The field is also technically challenging because of environmental conditions as well as often being conducted in remote offline regions. Current trends in available wearable technology devices suitable for earth science applications are explored, in addition to describing possible modifications to existing wearable technologies in order to make them deployable, practical offline-capable geoscience systems. Offline Health and safety monitoring systems designed to operate on a low-powered personal body-area network system as well as offline (non-internet dependent) wearable communication technologies are particularly addressed. These types of wearable technologies represent some of the most complex aspects in this field as well being some of the most customizable systems with highly configurable components for remote back country fieldwork functionality.

Are Wearables Good or Bad for Society?

Recent market research forecasts predict that a new form of wearable devices will soon influence the media landscape: Augmented Reality Smart Glasses. While prior research highlights numerous potentials in personal and professional settings of smart glasses, this technology has also triggered several controversies in public discussions, for example, the risk of violating privacy and copyright laws. Yet, little research addresses the questions of whether smart glasses are good or bad for societies, and if yes, why. This study conducts exploratory research to contribute to narrowing this gap. Based on a survey among consumers, the authors identify several societal benefits and risks that determine consumers' evaluation of the anticipated and desired success of smart glasses. These findings lead to numerous important implications for consumers, scholars, managers, and policy makers.

Life-Long Collections

In this paper the authors investigate the motivations for life-long collections and how these motivations can inform the design of future lifelog systems. Lifelogging is the practice of automatically capturing data from daily life experiences with mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearable cameras. Lifelog archives can benefit both older and younger people; therefore lifelog systems should be designed for people of all ages. The authors believe that people would be more likely to adopt lifelog practices that support their current motivations for collecting items. To identify these motivations, ten older and ten younger participants were interviewed. It was found that motivations for and against life-long collections evolve as people age and enter different stages, and that family is at the core of life-long collections. These findings will be used to guide the design of an intergenerational lifelog browser.

Employees' Protection

This chapter describes the conflict between employers' legitimate rights and employees' right to privacy and data protection as a result of the shift in workplace surveillance from a non-digital to a technologically advanced one. Section 1 describes the transition from non-digital workplace surveillance to an Internet-centred one, where “smart” devices are in a dominant position. Section 2 focuses on the legal framework (supranational and national legislation and case law) of workplace surveillance. In section 3, one case study regarding wearable technology and the law is carried out to prove that national and European legislation are not adequate to deal with all issues and ambiguities arising from the use of novel surveillance technology at work. The chapter concludes by noting that the adoption of sector specific legislation for employees' protection is necessary, but it would be incomplete without a general framework adopting modern instruments of data protection.

Digital Badges

Digital badges provide credentials to demonstrate successful student acquisition of knowledge, skills, and experience. The digital badges can especially excel at demonstrating new and emerging technology experiences through the use of wearable devices tailored to prepare students for the modern work place. Digital badges become virtual tracking systems making it possible to show students' specific learning, skills, and ultimately their employability. Not only do they record data on the individual student, they can track the institution and issuer each student has interacted with. With each successive use of such badges, a virtual narrative can be recorded reflecting how the badge was earned, what criteria was used, what standards were met, the rigor, and the different levels of learning.

Mobile Interactions Augmented by Wearable Computing

Wearable computing has a huge potential to shape the way we interact with mobile devices in the future. Interaction with mobile devices is still mainly limited to visual output and tactile finger-based input. Despite the visions of next-generation mobile interaction, the hand-held form factor hinders new interaction techniques becoming commonplace. In contrast, wearable devices and sensors are intended for more continuous and close-to-body use. This makes it possible to design novel wearable-augmented mobile interaction methods – both explicit and implicit. For example, the EEG signal from a wearable breast strap could be used to identify user status and change the device state accordingly (implicit) and the optical tracking with a head-mounted camera could be used to recognize gestural input (explicit). In this paper, the authors outline the design space for how the existing and envisioned wearable devices and sensors could augment mobile interaction techniques. Based on designs and discussions in a recently organized workshop on the topic as well as other related work, the authors present an overview of this design space and highlight some use cases that underline the potential therein.

Security, Privacy, and Ownership Issues With the Use of Wearable Health Technologies

When considering the use of mobile or wearable health technologies to collect health data, a majority of users state security and privacy of their data is a primary concern. With users being connected 24/7, there is a higher risk today of data theft or the misappropriate use of health data. Furthermore, data ownership is often a misunderstood topic in wearable technology, with many users unaware who owns the data collected by a device, what that data can be used for and who can receive that data. Many countries are reviewing privacy governance in an attempt to clarify data privacy and ownership. But is it too late? This chapter explores the concepts of security and privacy of data from mobile and wearable technology, with specific examples, and the implications for the future.

Wearable ECG Monitoring and Alerting System Associated With Smartphone

Heart disease has the second high mortality rate behind cancer in Japan, and requires quick treatment. To take a part in emerging mHealth, the authors developed a wearable electrocardiographic (ECG) monitoring and alerting system “iHeart”. iHeart continuously monitors patient's ECG in his/her daily activities and issues an alert to the patient as well as surrounding people if it detects abnormal heart behaviour. iHeart consists of a wireless ECG sensor and a smartphone to achieve light-weighted, low-cost system that does not degrade the patient's Quality of Life. In parallel, the authors developed ECG analysis algorithm to detect R-wave as well as arrhythmia, and implemented these algorithms in wireless ECG sensor rather than in smartphone to save power consumption of ECG sensor caused by radio communication. The authors proof the practicality and usefulness of our system in clinical experiment. This paper describes the implementation of iHeart, evaluation experiment, and future requirements of the system.