Wearable Biosensor Standardization: How to Make Them Smarter

Abstract

The availability of low-cost plug-and-play devices may contribute to the diffusion of methods and technologies for the personalized monitoring of physiological parameters by wearable devices. This paper is focused on biosensors, which represent an interesting enabling technology for the real-time continuous acquisition of biological or chemical analytes of physio-pathological interest, e.g., metabolites, protein biomarkers, and electrolytes in biofluids. Currently available commercial biosensors are usually referred to as customized and proprietary solutions. However, the efficient and robust development of e-health applications based on wearable biosensors can be eased from device interoperability. In this way, even if the different modules belong to different manufacturers, they can be added, upgraded, changed or removed without affecting the whole data acquisition system. A great effort in this direction has already been made by the ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 standard that introduces the concept of smart sensors by defining the main and essential characteristics that these devices should have. Following the guidelines provided by this standard, here we propose a set of characteristics that should be considered in the development of a smart biosensor and how they could be integrated into the existing standard.