Literature on Wearable Technology for Connected Health: scoping review on research trends, advances and barriers (Preprint)

Abstract

In the last decade the advances in wearable technology have driven and transformed performance monitoring in fitness and wellness applications, surveillance in extreme (working) conditions, and management of chronic diseases. These innovations have opened a whole new perspective on health and social care, challenged by vast expenditures in ageing societies.

The aim of this study is to scope the scientific literature in the field of pervasive wearable health monitoring in the time interval 2010-2019, identify chronological research trends and milestones, enabling technology innovations, and spot the gaps and barriers from technology and user perspectives.

This study follows the scoping review methodology and PRISMA guidelines to identify and process the available literature. As the scope surpasses the possibilities of manual search, we rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) to ensure efficient and exhaustive search of the literature corpus in three large digital libraries: IEEE, PubMed and Springer. The search is based on keywords and properties to be found in the articles using the search engines of the digital libraries.

The chronological analysis highlights the increasing numbers of publications that address health-related wearable technologies resulting from collaborative work on a global scale. The identified articles indicate the research focus on technology, delivery of prescriptive information, and user (data) safety and security. The literature corpus evidences major research progress in sensor technology (with regard to miniaturization and placement), communication protocols, data analytics, and evolution of cloud and edge computing powered architectures. The most addressed user related concerns are (technology)acceptance and privacy. The research lag in battery technology puts energy-efficiency as relevant consideration both in the design of sensor and network architectures with computational offloading. User-related gaps indicate more efforts should be invested into formalizing clear use-cases with timely and valuable feedback and prescriptive recommendations.

There is no doubt that wearable technology is a key enabler of a new model of healthcare delivery. While technology is driving the transformation, there is ongoing research resolving the user concerns related to reliability, privacy, comfort, and delivered feedback. The current research focus is on sustainable delivery of valuable recommendations, the enforcement of privacy by design, and technological solutions for energy-efficient pervasive sensing, seamless monitoring, and low-latency 5G communications.