The Sony Walkman was a clear commercial success. The Walkman and subsequent Sony Discman helped the company become an entertainment powerhouse. Over 400 million Walkman portable music players have been sold with about 200 million of those being cassette players.
However, not all products launched with a fanfare are destined for success. The commercial potential of many wearable technologies introduced in recent years are not always predictable or even achieved.
Fitbit filed for a $100 million initial public offering, but it now has to compete against a plethora of other fitness trackers on the market. The Apple Watch was been launched amidst a great deal of publicity, but it comes with no guarantees for Apple – a company that needs a lot of new revenues on a product to move the needle. Finally, the creation of the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headsets could finally bring VR to the masses. The company has already been bought by Facebook for over $2 billion. Garmin, as a global positioning system (GPS), and Samsung Galaxy Gear, as a smart watch, are other popular wearables.
What is clear is that, based on the history of wearable technology, devices that move the masses are far and between. The successes that do make it, however, can change the world and generate chart-topping returns. Meanwhile, people's needs change over time, and include entertainment, activity, sport, and now most importantly health. This brings wearables such as Quell to the market. When strapped on the body Quell predicts and detects the onset of chronic pain and stimulates nerves to block pain signals to the brain. Other wearables to measure blood alcohol content, athletic performance, blood sugar, heart rate, and many other bioindicators rapidly came to the market as the desire for health monitoring grew. This may become more demanding as the interest in personal medicine grows.
1.2 Introduction to BSN Technology
Wearable technology including sensors, sensor networks, and the associated devices has opened its space in a variety of applications. Long-term, noninvasive, and nonintrusive monitoring of the human body through collecting as much biometric data and state indicators as possible is the major goal of healthcare wearable technology developers. Patients suffering from diabetes need a simple noninvasive tool to monitor their blood sugar on an hourly basis. Those suffering from seizure require the necessary instrumentation to alarm them before any seizure onset to prevent them from fall injury. The stroke patients need their heart rate recorded constantly. These are only a small number of examples which show how crucial and necessary wearable healthcare systems can be.
At the Wearable Technology Conference in 2018, the winners of seven wearable device producers were introduced. These winners include the best ones in Lifestyle with the objective of ‘play stress away’; Sports and Fitness for making a football performance device, healthcare for developing a smart eyewear with assistive artificial intelligence capabilities for the blind and visually impaired; Industrial for designing a unique smart and connected industry 4.0 safety shoe; Smart Clothing Challenge for the nonintrusive acquisition of heart signals that will enable pervasive health monitoring, emotional state assessment, drowsiness detection, and identity recognition; Smart Lamp, which allows you to move the light in any direction without moving the lamp; and Connected Living Challenge, for creating accessories linking braintech with fashion design. Headpieces and earrings use electroencephalography (EEG) technology, capturing and providing users with brain data, allowing them to be conscious of their mental state in real time, for example for reducing anxiety and depression or increasing focus or relaxation of the user [1]. This simple example together with the above examples clearly show the diversity in applications of wearable technology. The aim of this book is therefore to familiarise readers with sensors, connections, signal processing tools and algorithms, electronics, communication systems, and networking protocols as well as many applications of wearable devices for the monitoring of mental, metabolic, physical, and physiological states of the human body.
Disease prevention, patient monitoring, and disable and elderly homecare have become the major objectives for investment in social health and public wellbeing. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an ageing population is becoming a significant problem and degenerative brain diseases, such as dementia and depression, are increasingly seen in people while a bad lifestyle is causing millions of people to suffer from obesity or chronic diseases. It is thus reasonable to expect that this circumstance will only contribute to an ongoing decline in the quality of services (QoSs) provided by an already overloaded healthcare system [2]. A remote low-cost monitoring strategy, therefore, would significantly promote social and clinical wellbeing. This can only be achieved if sufficient reliably recorded information from the human body is available. Such information may be metabolic, biological, physiological, behavioural, psychological, functional, or motion-related.
On the other hand, the development of mobile telephone systems since the early 1990s and its improvement till now together with the availability of large size archiving and wideband communication channels significantly increase the chance of achieving the above objectives without hospitalising the caretakers in hospitals and care units for a long time. This may be considered a revolution in human welfare. More effective and efficient data collection from the human body has therefore a tremendous impact and influence on healthcare and the technology involved. The state of a patient during rest, walking, working, and sleeping can be well recognised if all the biomarkers of the physiological, biological, and behavioural changes of human body can be measured and processed. This requirement sparks the need for deployment of a multisensor and multimodal data collection system on the body. A body sensor network (BSN) therefore is central to a complete solution for patient monitoring and healthcare. Several key applications benefit from the advanced integration of BSNs, often called body area networks (BANs), with the new mobile communication technology [3, 4].
The main applications of BSNs are expected to appear in the healthcare domain, especially for the continuous monitoring and logging of vital parameters of elderly people or patients suffering from degenerative diseases such as dementia or chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma, and heart attacks. As an example, a BAN network on a patient can alert the hospital, even before they have a heart attack, through measuring changes in their vital signs, or placing it on a diabetic patient could auto-inject insulin through a pump as soon as their insulin level declines.
The IEEE 802.15 Task Group 6 (BAN) is developing a communication standard optimised for reliable low-power devices and operation on, in, or around the human body (but not limited to humans) to serve a variety of applications including medical, consumer electronics/personal entertainment, and security [5]. This was approved on 22 July 2011 and the first meeting of IEEE 802.15 wireless personal area network (WPAN) was held on 3 March 2017.
The BSN technology benefits from developments in various areas of sensors, automation, communications, and more closely the vast advances in wired and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for short- and long-range communications and industrial control. For interconnecting multiple appliances, for example, some developed their own personal area network (PAN). One was by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which was later expanded by Thomas G. Zimmerman to interconnect different body sensors and actuators to locate the human through the measures performed by electric field sensors. He introduced the PAN technology by exploiting the body as a conductor. Neil Gershenfeld, a physician at MIT, did the major work on near-field coupling of the field and human body tissue for localisation [6]. By fixing pairs of antennas on the body, for example around the elbow and hand, and applying an electric current through them, they showed that the system is capable of tracking the person. They learnt that as one moves a capacitance in their circuit is charged. So, they can locate the antennas in places where there is maximum change in the movement between them.
BSNs have their root within WSNs. Like many advanced technologies, the origin of WSNs can be seen in military and heavy industrial applications. The first wireless network which had some similarity with a modern WSN is the sound surveillance system (SOSUS), developed by the United States military in the 1950s to detect and track Soviet submarines. This network used submerged acoustic sensors – hydrophones – distributed in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This sensing technology