Healthcare smart sensors represent integrated sensing systems capable of capturing, processing, and transmitting vital health parameters in real-time using advanced embedded electronics and connectivity. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the key concepts, theoretical advances, types, applications, benefits, challenges, emerging trends, and future outlooks concerning smart sensors in healthcare and biomedicine. Detailed sub-sections analyze wearable, implantable and ambient varieties based on working principles, capabilities, and limitations. Remote patient monitoring, telehealth, elderly care, rehabilitation, and surgical assistance are among the promising application domains explored. Overall, the profound impact of smart sensors in accelerating the digital transformation of healthcare through continuous, real-time monitoring of vital parameters is highlighted alongside an optimistic outlook of further advances improving patient outcomes.
Driving Smart Medical Diagnosis Through AI-Powered Technologies and Applications
Top1. Introduction
The origins of smart sensor technologies for healthcare date back to the 1960s when automated analyzers for biomarkers like glucose, hematocrit, and blood gases started emerging, enabling lab-grade investigations in clinical settings (Higgins, 2019). However, size, cost and usability constraints limited their adoption for longitudinal patient monitoring. The 1970s saw early medical telemetry systems for wireless vitals transmission take root, such as Holter monitors for ambulatory cardiac rhythm tracking (Bonato et al., 2012). Nonetheless, the relatively simple analog sensors provided restricted parameter insights.
By the 1980s and 90s, rapid advances in micromachining, microelectronics and materials science paved the way for miniaturized electrochemical sensors and wearable activity trackers (Higgins, 2019; Darwish & Hassanien, 2019). Some also incorporated simple microprocessors for rudimentary processing, storage and transmission of step counts, heart rate, etc., albeit needing frequent recalibrations. However, the technological convergence in the 1990s significantly accelerated the smart sensor development through efficient fabrication approaches leveraging printed circuit boards and system-on-chip designs (Bonato et al., 2012). This enabled more powerful on-board computing capacities for self-contained devices measuring multiple parameters reliably. Remote patient monitoring business models also emerged in this period (Higgins, 2019).
Over the past decade, healthcare smart sensors witnessed an explosion in innovation through the synergistic integration with wireless connectivity modules leveraging WiFi, Bluetooth and cell networks alongside geo-tagging and video modules (Darwish & Hassanien, 2019). The incorporation of IoT, cloud analytics and AI capabilities in particular have enhanced the intelligence, sensitivity, automation and predictive capacities manifold through adaptive machine learning across sensor systems (Casson & Rodriguez-Villegas, 2020). Advanced connectivity protocols like 5G, sophisticated data mining algorithms and blockchain-enabled security mechanisms have further improved the speed, interoperability, accuracy and robustness across monitoring tools, wearables, ambient assisted living setups and navigational implants expediting the digital transformation of healthcare (Khang & Rana et al., 2023).