A PRACTICAL SURVEY ON HEALTH MONITORING DEVICES AND THEIR IMPACT ON QUALITY OF LIFE

Abstract

As a follow-up of the current escalated technology, especially in the fields related to advanced sensors and pervasive computing, significant changes have been brought in medical diagnostics and health surveillance equipment, including arrangements for prevention, self-care monitoring of various chronic conditions, as well as high performance hospital monitoring systems. This paper provides a detailed definition of a healthcare monitoring device and offers a multi-perspective classification of them. Some important examples (such as clothing-embedded sensors, mobile/smart devices, microprocessor-based monitoring systems, implantable sensors), and their exact fields of usage (e.g. blood pressure and heart rate monitoring, pulmonary arterial hypertension detection, diabetes management, movement impairments and so on) are also given, as well as a brief note on the exploited technologies (for instance wireless networks and sensors, microelectronics, biosensing technologies) in order to set the trends and offer a better understanding of the capabilities of health monitoring devices. We claim that learning how these health monitoring devices can improve one's lifestyle is of tremendous importance, therefore we underline the advantages of implementing and using them versus the reasons for which they are considered to be inappropriate, intrusive and controversial by some people who feel rather reluctant about the daily monitoring of their health parameters. Finally, means of educating people about how to optimally exploit the information given by health monitoring devices are presented, taking into account several factors, e.g. environment, age, people whom they interact with. In addition to this, best practices related to attracting more followers towards a healthier and more qualitative life through health monitoring devices will be enumerated. Obviously, there are also some risks in trying to raise people's awareness in this matter, that need to be assumed and are discussed within this article.