On Body Vitals Monitoring for Disease Prediction: A Systematic Survey

Abstract

AbstractWith the increase in the number of people influenced by chronic ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and many more, promoting a healthy mind and body for a liberated way of life is the need of the hour. A possible way to achieve this to be aware of the vital body signs and monitor them continuously, so as to detect any anomalies in the body of an individual. The traditional way of monitoring the vital body signs becomes insufficient as the frequency of monitoring is not enough to reveal the underlying degradation of the patient health (Mei and Gül, 2019). Internet of things (IOT) in healthcare have come forward as a promising field for remote monitoring of the vital body signs, thereby emerging as a necessary component of the medical systems in the course of time (Wu et al., 2019). These remote monitoring systems have the potential to uncover the latent causes responsible for a particular disease and is an active research area grabbing the interest of the academia and the industries as well. For people having serious health concerns, these systems can be particularly life-saving. Also, these systems can diminish the load on the existing healthcare framework by decreasing the number of repetitive visits to the hospital. Due to the accelerated advancement in technology, the purview of the remote healthcare systems has improved to a considerable extent (Tokognon et al., 2017). These systems are essentially established on the grounds of advanced wireless networks and wearable sensor technologies. The paradigm shift of the current healthcare systems from clinic-centric to patient-centric has been possible due to the assimilation of mobile communication approaches with wearable sensor technology (Bonato, 2003). Wearable health monitoring system has the capability of providing constantly the status of the vital body signs, which can give a comprehensive overview of the health of an individual. Hence, these health monitoring systems based on wireless sensor technology will be able to decrease the costs of health monitoring leading to the improvement of the quality of life (Lymberis and Gatzoulis, 2006). Monitoring of the vital body signs has been made possible due to the significant enhancement of the relevant technologies. In this chapter, some of the critical facets for the monitoring systems for vital body signs have been summarized, along with the architecture of some of the most advanced wearable vital signs technologies developed so far. Here, first a target has been made to provide the background study essential for the understanding of the basic vital body signs like electrocardiogram, heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, blood oxygen saturation and body temperature, etc. extracted from non-invasive wearable health devices. Then a review on the effect and monitoring needs for each of the vital sign is made in order to understand the starting point of intervention for the individual vital body signs. Finally, a detailed description on the current technological advancements on the health monitoring systems based on the vital body parameters is presented.KeywordsInternet of thingsWireless networksWearable sensor technologyHealth monitoring systemsVital signsDisease prediction