Can smartwatches replace smartphones for posture tracking?

This paper introduces a human posture tracking platform to identify the human postures of sitting, standing or lying down, based on a smartwatch. This work develops such a system as a proof-of-concept study to investigate a smartwatch's ability to be used in future remote health monitoring systems and applications. This work validates the smartwatches' ability to track the posture of users accurately in a laboratory setting while reducing the sampling rate to potentially improve battery life, the first steps in verifying that such a system would work in future clinical settings. The algorithm developed classifies the transitions between three posture states of sitting, standing and lying down, by identifying these transition movements, as well as other movements that might be mistaken for these transitions. The system is trained and developed on a Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, and the algorithm was validated through a leave-one-subject-out cross-validation of 20 subjects. The system can identify the appropriate transitions at only 10 Hz with an F-score of 0.930, indicating its ability to effectively replace smart phones, if needed

A pervasive body sensor network for monitoring post-operative recovery

Over the past decade, miniaturisation and cost reduction brought about by the semiconductor industry has led to computers smaller in size than a pin head, powerful enough to carry out the processing required, and affordable enough to be disposable. Similar technological advances in wireless communication, sensor design, and energy storage have resulted in the development of wireless “Body Sensor Network (BSN) platforms comprising of tiny integrated micro sensors with onboard processing and wireless data transfer capability, offering the prospect of pervasive and continuous home health monitoring. In surgery, the reduced trauma of minimally invasive interventions combined with initiatives to reduce length of hospital stay and a socioeconomic drive to reduce hospitalisation costs, have all resulted in a trend towards earlier discharge from hospital. There is now a real need for objective, pervasive, and continuous post-operative home recovery monitoring systems. Surgical recovery is a multi-faceted and dynamic process involving biological, physiological, functional, and psychological components. Functional recovery (physical independence, activities of daily living, and mobility) is recognised as a good global indicator of a patient’s post-operative course, but has traditionally been difficult to objectively quantify. This thesis outlines the development of a pervasive wireless BSN system to objectively monitor the functional recovery of post-operative patients at home. Biomechanical markers were identified as surrogate measures for activities of daily living and mobility impairment, and an ear-worn activity recognition (e-AR) sensor containing a three-axis accelerometer and a pulse oximeter was used to collect this data. A simulated home environment was created to test a Bayesian classifier framework with multivariate Gaussians to model activity classes. A real-time activity index was used to provide information on the intensity of activity being performed. Mobility impairment was simulated with bracing systems and a multiresolution wavelet analysis and margin-based feature selection framework was used to detect impaired mobility. The e-AR sensor was tested in a home environment before its clinical use in monitoring post-operative home recovery of real patients who have undergone surgery. Such a system may eventually form part of an objective pervasive home recovery monitoring system tailored to the needs of today’s post-operative patient.Open acces

The Emerging Wearable Solutions in mHealth

The marriage of wearable sensors and smartphones have fashioned a foundation for mobile health technologies that enable healthcare to be unimpeded by geographical boundaries. Sweeping efforts are under way to develop a wide variety of smartphone-linked wearable biometric sensors and systems. This chapter reviews recent progress in the field of wearable technologies with a focus on key solutions for fall detection and prevention, Parkinson’s disease assessment and cardiac disease, blood pressure and blood glucose management. In particular, the smartphone-based systems, without any external wearables, are summarized and discussed

Data Analysis for Physical Activity Monitoring

Master's thesis in Computer SciencePhysical activity is essential for humans for maintaining a healthy and comfortable lifestyle. With science and technological advancements, there comes various guidelines for the amount of physical activity a person should perform. Monitoring the physical activity enables us to follow those guidelines and be aware of own activity. Wearable computing is allowing us to track and monitor our own performed physical activities by mostly intrinsic (minimal) interaction. Physical activity monitoring is an emerging research area in wearable computing. Our thesis is about identifying and classifying which activity is being performed. We have used various classifiers and evaluation metrics to validate our classifier models

12th Annual Symposium of the School of Science, Engineering and Health

Welcome to the 12th Annual Symposium of the School of Science, Engineering and Health! This event continues a strong tradition showcasing student an faculty innovation, creativity and productivity in academic departments largely from within the School of Science, Engineering and Health

The Apple Watch for monitoring mental health–related physiological symptoms : literature review

Background: An anticipated surge in mental health service demand related to COVID-19 has motivated the use of novel methods of care to meet demand, given workforce limitations. Digital health technologies in the form of self-tracking technology have been identified as a potential avenue, provided sufficient evidence exists to support their effectiveness in mental health contexts. Objective: This literature review aims to identify current and potential physiological or physiologically related monitoring capabilities of the Apple Watch relevant to mental health monitoring and examine the accuracy and validation status of these measures and their implications for mental health treatment. Methods: A literature review was conducted from June 2021 to July 2021 of both published and gray literature pertaining to the Apple Watch, mental health, and physiology. The literature review identified studies validating the sensor capabilities of the Apple Watch. Results: A total of 5583 paper titles were identified, with 115 (2.06%) reviewed in full. Of these 115 papers, 19 (16.5%) were related to Apple Watch validation or comparison studies. Most studies showed that the Apple Watch could measure heart rate acceptably with increased errors in case of movement. Accurate energy expenditure measurements are difficult for most wearables, with the Apple Watch generally providing the best results compared with peers, despite overestimation. Heart rate variability measurements were found to have gaps in data but were able to detect mild mental stress. Activity monitoring with step counting showed good agreement, although wheelchair use was found to be prone to overestimation and poor performance on overground tasks. Atrial fibrillation detection showed mixed results, in part because of a high inconclusive result rate, but may be useful for ongoing monitoring. No studies recorded validation of the Sleep app feature; however, accelerometer-based sleep monitoring showed high accuracy and sensitivity in detecting sleep. Conclusions: The results are encouraging regarding the application of the Apple Watch in mental health, particularly as heart rate variability is a key indicator of changes in both physical and emotional states. Particular benefits may be derived through avoidance of recall bias and collection of supporting ecological context data. However, a lack of methodologically robust and replicated evidence of user benefit, a supportive health economic analysis, and concerns about personal health information remain key factors that must be addressed to enable broader uptake

Design and Application of Wireless Body Sensors

Hörmann T. Design and Application of Wireless Body Sensors. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2019

ATOPE+: An mHealth System to Support Personalized Therapeutic Exercise Interventions in Patients With Cancer

The authors express their gratitude to the patients and experts for their participation in the evaluation of ATOPEC. They also express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for the instructive criticism of an earlier version of this article.The introduction of mobile technologies in therapeutic exercise interventions has permitted the collection of fine-grained objective quantified information about patients' health. However, exercise interventions generally fail to leverage these data when personalizing the exercise needs of patients individually. Interventions that include technology-driven personalization strategies typically rely on the use of expensive laboratory equipment with expert supervision, or in the self-management of patients to meet the prescribed exercise levels by an activity tracker. These methods often do not perform better than non technology-driven methods, therefore more sophisticated strategies are required to improve the personalization process. In this paper we present ATOPE+, an mHealth system to support personalized exercise interventions in patients with cancer based on workload-recovery ratio estimation. ATOPE+ enables the remote assessment of workload-recovery ratio to provide optimal exercise dosage by means of a knowledge-based system and by combining physiological data from heterogeneous data sources in a multilevel architecture. The results show that ATOPE+ is a system ready to be used in the context of a clinical trial after being tested with patients with breast cancer and conducting an usability evaluation by clinical experts.Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities (MICINN) PGC2018-098813-B-C31 RTI2018-101674-B-I00Health Research Funds of the Carlos III Health Institute PI18/01840German Research Foundation (DFG) FPU16/04201 FPU17/0093