Editorial - Special issue on sensors for noninvasive physiological monitoring

Abstract

The need for noninvasive physiological monitoring has been a goal for some time, but there were many technical limitations in the past that limited development of this new category of tools. Some of these limitations have now been solved and addressed thanks to new discoveries and advances in the fields of measurement technology, material science, micro/nanotechnologies, electronics, signal processing, diagnosis approaches, and image processing capabilities – just to name a few. The aforementioned advances allow us to noninvasively monitor many physiological parameters and to develop new devices and instrumentation to examine the function of many diverse physiological systems, namely, heart, brain, foetus, body motion, kidney, blood, breathing, lungs, skin, eyes – again, naming only a few applications. This Special Issue has shown the interest of international scientific community working on the topic, and we received manuscript submissions on almost every topic of noninvasive sensing, including: technology infrastructure, software issues, sensors and sensing systems. Wireless sensor networks are particularly interesting, and there is an urgent and growing need for this technology in the area of health monitoring and medical telemetry. This has been greatly facilitated by advances in the biological sensor research area. Health monitoring for both routine and critical life-threatening purposes may both be equally of interest, and there are still remaining technical constraints that should be studied in more depth, including: lowering overall power consumption, increased security measures for critical data, adaptability to various network configurations, increased data throughput, and message latency. Seeing the index of works that were selected for final publication, most of subtopics of the call for papers have been covered by very high quality contributions.