Biosensors and Internet of Things in smart healthcare applications: challenges and opportunities

The use of health and well-being monitoring technologies has been steadily increasing and such systems can now be found in smart homes, age-friendly workplaces, public spaces, and elsewhere. These monitoring technologies employ a wide variety of off-the-shelf smart sensors and medical devices to support functional, physiological, and behavioral monitoring and to address social interaction aspects of daily life. These systems focus either on specific health-related conditions or on supporting the more general aims of comfort, well-being, and quality of life. However, there remain several technological (interoperability, expandability, etc.) and societal (cost, privacy, etc.) challenges to be addressed before smart biosensor systems are widely adopted. Motivated by the above, this chapter highlights the challenges and opportunities surrounding the application of smart biosensors in healthcare and presents three state of the art solutions for leveraging smart sensors in this context. The first concerns a smart living solution platform that integrates heterogeneous sensors and assistive medical and mobile devices, enabling continuous data collection from the everyday lives of the elderly and data analytics that support personalized interventions. The second presents an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem comprising sensors and smart wearables to improve occupational safety and workforce productivity through personalized recommendations. The last case is an intelligent noninvasive biosignal recording system that detects potentially hazardous pathological conditions of infants during sleep.