Role of Smart Wearables in Remote Patient Monitoring for Diabetes

Abstract

Diabetes is affecting people all over the world. Smart wearables are convenient alternatives to monitor diabetes and are rapidly adopted. Smart wearables enable remote patient monitoring which is a great boon for the elderly, wilderness care, and patients suffering from diabetic foot ulcers, and gestational diabetes. The objective of this review is to study the development, and trend in the use of smart wearables for diabetes treatment, and remote patient monitoring based on research papers available in the Scopus database. The present work examines the existing literature through network diagrams generated by the VOSviewer tool. Scopus is one of the largest databases used by researchers. Research papers from the year 1987 to 2023 were considered to observe the trend, and filters were applied to select the source type, “Journal”, language “En- glish”, and “Article, Reviews, and Conference papers” from the document type. The final number of documents was ascertained after removing irrelevant documents and employing VOSviewer software to create network diagrams. Results indicate that a significant increase in research happened after the year 2019. Network diagrams revealed that the United States published the highest number of research publications. The analysis of co-authorship with keywords is discussed. This review includes future directions for researchers based on the analysis of network diagrams. The distinctive feature of this study is the unique way of presenting the analysis of VOSviewer diagrams. Index Terms—Diabetes, Remote patient monitoring, Smart wearables, VOSviewer, Scopus