Introduction to the Special Issue on the Wearable Technologies for Smart Health

Abstract

Wearable health-tracking consumer products are gaining popularity, including smartwatches, fitness trackers, smart clothing, and head-mounted devices. These wearable devices promise new opportunities for the study of health-related behavior, for tracking of chronic conditions, and for innovative interventions in support of health and wellness. Next-generation wearable technologies have the potential to transform today’s hospitalcentered healthcare practices into proactive, individualized care. Although it seems new technologies enter the marketplace every week, there is still a great need for research on the development of sensors, sensor-data analytics, wearable interaction modalities, and more. In this special issue, we sought to assemble a set of articles addressing novel computational research related to any aspect of the design or use of wearables in medicine and health, including wearable hardware design, AI and data analytics algorithms, human-device interaction, security/privacy, and novel applications. Here, in Part 1 of a two-part collection of articles on this topic, we are pleased to share seven articles about the use of wearables for emotion sensing, physiotherapy, virtual reality, automated meal detection, a human data model, and a survey of physical-activity tracking. In the first article, “EmotionSense: An Adaptive Emotion Recognition System Based on Wearable Smart Devices”, Wang et al. propose an adaptive emotion recognition system based on smartwatches. The proposed approach first identifies user activities and employs an adaptive emotion-recognition method that extracts finegrained features from multi-mode sensory data and characterizes different emotions. This work demonstrates that wearable devices like smartwatches have made it possible to recognize physiological and behavioral patterns of humans in a convenient and non-invasive manner. In the next article, “Physiotherapy over a Distance: The Use of Wearable Technology for Video Consultations in Hospital Settings”, Aggarwal et al. report the findings of a field evaluation of a wearable technology, called SoPhy, in assessment of lower-limb movements in video consultations. The results show a number of advantages of the wearable systems like SoPhy, including helping physiotherapists in identifying subtle differences in the patient’s movements, increasing the diagnostic confidence of the physiotherapists and guiding more accurate assessment of the patients, and enhancing the overall clinician-patient communication in better understanding the therapy goals to the patients. Based on the findings, the article also presents design implications to guide further development of the video-consultation systems. Next, the article “On Shooting Stars: Comparing CAVE and HMD Immersive Virtual Reality Exergaming for Adults with Mixed Ability”, presents a study that explores the effects of two different iVR systems, the Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) and HTC Vive Head-Mounted Display (HMD), for use as a physicaltherapy system. Using an exercise game, Project Star Catcher (PSC), the authors conducted a cross-examination between impaired and non-impaired groups of n=40 users. The results suggest that the HMD iVR system was far more effective in increasing both the physical performance and physiological response of the exercise