Abstract
Healthcare is a field that is rapidly developing in technology and services. A recent development in this area is remote monitoring of patients which has many advantages in a fast aging world population with increasing health complications. With relatively simple applications to monitor patients inside hospital rooms, the technology has developed to the extent that the patient can be allowed normal daily activities at home while still being monitored with the use of modern communication and sensor technologies. Sensors for monitoring essential vital signs such as electrocardiogram reading, heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, temperature, blood glucose levels and neural system activity are available today. Range of remote healthcare varies from monitoring chronically ill patients, elders, premature children to victims of accidents. These new technologies can monitor patients based on the illness or based on the situation. The technology varies from sensors attached to body to ambient sensors attached to the environment and new breakthroughs show contactless monitoring which requires only the patient to be present within a few meters from the sensor. Fall detection systems and applications to monitor chronical ill patients have already become familiar to many. This study provides a review of the recent advances in remote healthcare and monitoring in both with-contact and contactless methods. With the review, the authors discuss some issues available in most systems. The paper also includes some directions for future research.
Highlights
Remote healthcare is an emerging research field as the world moves towards remote monitoring, real-time and fast detection of illnesses
This paper aims to fulfil the requirement of a survey paper that analyses both with-contact and contactless, image-based remote health monitoring systems from very recent literature i.e. developed/proposed between 2012 and 2016
This study shows that there is a significant correlation between smartphone data and selfrated depression symptoms rated on Hamilton Depression Rating Scale-17 (HDRS17) with p-values below 0.05
Summary
Remote healthcare is an emerging research field as the world moves towards remote monitoring, real-time and fast detection of illnesses. The advantages of remote monitoring of patients are: early and real-time detection of illnesses, ability to continuously monitor patients, prevention of worsening of illnesses and untimely deaths, cost reduction in hospitalizations, reduce the number of hospitalizations, obtain more accurate readings while permitting usual daily activities for patients, improve efficiency in healthcare services by utilizing communication technology, emergency medical care, service for patients with mobility issues, emergency care for traffic accidents and other injuries and usage of non-invasive medical interventions. Remote monitoring of patients target several sub-groups of patients, such as patients diagnosed with chronic illnesses, patients with mobility issues, or other disability, post-surgery patients, neonates and elderly patients. All these types of patients have conditions that are better to be monitored continuously. Most research follow the policy of allowing the mobility and activity freedom at home or personal environments which are beneficial for the patients rather than being
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