A Review on Assisted Living Using Wearable Devices

Abstract

Forecasts about the aging trend of the world population agree on identifying increased life expectancy as a serious risk factor for the financial sustainability of social healthcare systems if not properly supported by innovative care management policies. Such policies should include the integration within traditional healthcare services of assistive technologies as tools for prolonging healthy and independent living at home, but also for introducing innovations in clinical practice such as long-term and remote health monitoring. For their part, solutions for active and assisted living have now reached a high degree of technological maturity, thanks to the considerable amount of research work carried out in recent years to develop highly reliable and energy-efficient wearable sensors capable of enabling the development of systems to monitor activity and physiological parameters over time, and in a minimally invasive manner. This work reviews the role of wearable sensors in the design and development of assisted living solutions, focusing on human activity recognition by joint use of onboard electromyography sensors and inertial measurement units and on the acquisition of parameters related to overall physical and psychological conditions, such as heart activity and skin conductance.

Keywords: assisted living; biomedical measurement systems; electromyography; human activity recognition; skin conductance; wearable devices.

Figure 1

Typical body sites where sensors used in analyzed studies have been placed: (a) single accelerometer or IMU, (b) sEMG sensor, and (c) PPG and EDA sensors. Please note that the left or right side position of the marker representing the sensor is not relevant but only chosen for better readability of the figure.