Wearable Medical Monitoring Systems Based on Wireless Networks: A Review

The last decade has witnessed a rapid increase of interest in new sensing and monitoring devices, including wireless wearable mobile devices and sensing networks for medical health applications. This paper reviews current wearable mobile medical monitoring systems (WMMMSs) with emphasis on devices based on textile and wireless sensing networks. These monitoring systems consist of various types of small physiological sensors, transmission modules, and processing capabilities. In addition, WMMMSs have a potential to change the health care model by providing inexpensive wearable unobtrusive solutions for continuous medical health monitoring. It is with the hope that the current survey is able to provide a direction for future research improvements and also serve as a reference for current achievements and their maturity level. In this review, a great number of system implementations are compared according to different classifications. Besides, these systems also act as an effective approach to identify the technological advantages and disadvantages of the current state-of-the-art in wearable devices solutions.