Biosensors and Interfaces for Mobile Healthcare

Dear Colleagues,

The proposed Special Issue will focus on sensors and their interfaces in the new emerging field of digital health, namely for remote health care and ambient assisted living applications. Wearable systems for continuous health monitoring are a key technology in helping the transition to more proactive and affordable healthcare. They allow an individual to closely monitor changes in her or his vital signs and provide feedback to help maintain an optimal health status. If integrated into a telemedical system, these systems can even alert medical personnel when life-threatening changes occur. In addition, the wearable systems can be used for the health monitoring of patients in ambulatory settings. For example, they can be used as part of a diagnostic procedure, for the optimal maintenance of a chronic condition, supervised recovery from an acute event or surgical procedure, to monitor adherence to treatment guidelines (e.g., regular cardiovascular exercise), or to monitor the effects of drug therapy (including checks on elderly people actually taking their daily dose). During the last few years there has been a significant increase in the number and variety of wearable health monitoring devices, ranging from simple pulse monitors, activity monitors, and portable Holter monitors, to sophisticated and expensive implantable sensors. However, wider acceptance of the existing systems is still limited by the following important restrictions. Traditionally, personal medical monitoring systems, such as Holter monitors, have been used only to collect data. Data processing and analysis are performed offline, making such devices impractical for continual monitoring and early detection of medical disorders. Systems with multiple sensors for physical rehabilitation often feature unwieldy wires between the sensors and the monitoring system. These wires may limit the patient's activity and level of comfort and thus negatively influence the measured results. In addition, individual sensors often operate as stand-alone systems and usually do not offer flexibility and integration with third-party devices. Finally, the existing systems are rarely made affordable. On the other hand, wireless body area networks (WBANs) are one of the most promising approaches to building wearable health monitoring systems. A WBAN consists of multiple sensor nodes, each capable of sampling, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs (heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, activity) or environmental parameters (location, temperature, humidity, light). Typically, these sensors are placed strategically on the human body as tiny patches or hidden in users’ clothes, allowing ubiquitous health monitoring in their native environment for extended periods of time. A number of recent research efforts focus on wearable systems for health monitoring.

Therefore, this Special Issue targets high-quality unpublished research articles on remote sensing technologies used to acquire biological parameters (EEG, ECG, EMG, etc.). It also seeks to leverage innovative research concepts and methods for health care, sports, and other novel applications, articulating new perspectives, highlights, open issues, and challenges.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Cloud sensing for healthcare and sports
• Wearable smart sensors and actuators for health care and AAL
• Multimedia signal acquisition based on compressive sensing
• Electronic multi-panel platforms for healthcare applications
• Wireless communication with/within swarms of implantable devices
• Innovative circuits and interfaces for communication with medical instruments
• Media sensing for video-games
• Resource allocation in multimedia health care
• Biometric authentication for media healthcare applications
• Multimedia enhanced learning, training, and simulation for health
• Data fusion in multimedia sensor networks
• EEG, EMG, ECG signal detection and real time processing
• Modeling of sensors and devices

Prof. Daniela De Venuto
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Wearable smart sensor
• sensor and biosensor interfaces
• wireless smart sensor
• implantable sensors
• ECG
• EEG
• ECoG
• EMG
• sensor signal processing and ML algorithms