The future of wearable biotechnology

In the future, wearable devices that monitor biosignals with high fidelity, just like devices in the hospital, could be a part of a healthy lifestyle.

But these wearable devices aren’t widely available yet. Stuart et al. presented an overview summarizing what has been created to date and what the future might hold.

“Such devices could have the ability to not only monitor for acute changes in physiology, such as cardiac arrythmia or oxygenation, but also capture subtle changes, such as aging related progression of frailty or neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimers,” said co-author Philipp Gutruf.

Wearable devices have gathered renewed attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, where they have been used to help with contact tracing and monitoring for early warning signs of an infection, among other things.

However, creating the hardware for next generation devices still faces substantial roadblocks, including finding ways to regularly collect data without disrupting daily activity, limitations of battery power, and public acceptance of such devices. If wearable devices can be improved, they can advance disease diagnosis and enable new forms of therapy and personalized medicine.

In addition to discussing such challenges and promising approaches to new technology breakthroughs, the review summarized developments for integrating artificial intelligence, or AI, into next-generation devices. Using AI could help improve disease prediction and diagnosis, which would enhance health care quality and reduce medical costs.

“We hope that this review will motivate a research focus in human-centered engineering aspects that are often overlooked by fundamental and applied research,” Gutruf said.

Source: “Wearable devices for continuous monitoring of biosignals: Challenges and opportunities,” by Tucker Stuart, Jessica Hanna, and Philipp Gutruf, APL Bioengineering (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0086935 .

This paper is part of the Emerging Technologies in Wearable Sensors Collection, learn more here .