Wearable Devices in Health Monitoring from the Environmental towards Multiple Domains: A Survey

The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes the environmental, behavioral, physiological, and psychological domains that impact adversely human health, well-being, and quality of life (QoL) in general. The environmental domain has significant interaction with the others. With respect to proactive and personalized medicine and the Internet of medical things (IoMT), wearables are most important for continuous health monitoring. In this work, we analyze wearables in healthcare from a perspective of innovation by categorizing them according to the four domains. Furthermore, we consider the mode of wearability, costs, and prolonged monitoring. We identify features and investigate the wearable devices in the terms of sampling rate, resolution, data usage (propagation), and data transmission. We also investigate applications of wearable devices. Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Library delivered wearables that we require to monitor at least one environmental parameter, e.g., a pollutant. According to the number of domains, from which the wearables record data, we identify groups: G1, environmental parameters only; G2, environmental and behavioral parameters; G3, environmental, behavioral, and physiological parameters; and G4 parameters from all domains. In total, we included 53 devices of which 35, 9, 9, and 0 belong to G1, G2, G3, and G4, respectively. Furthermore, 32, 11, 7, and 5 wearables are applied in general health and well-being monitoring, specific diagnostics, disease management, and non-medical. We further propose customized and quantified output for future wearables from both, the perspectives of users, as well as physicians. Our study shows a shift of wearable devices towards disease management and particular applications. It also indicates the significant role of wearables in proactive healthcare, having capability of creating big data and linking to external healthcare systems for real-time monitoring and care delivery at the point of perception.