JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Currently nearly six in ten US adults are suffering from at least one chronic condition. Wearable technology could help in controlling the healthcare costs by remote monitoring and early detection of disease worsening. However, in recent years there have been disappointments in wearable technology with respect to reliability, the lack of feedback and/or the lack of user comfort. One of the promising sensor techniques for wearable monitoring in chronic disease is bioimpedance. Bioimpedance is a non-invasive versatile sensing method that can be applied in different ways to extract a wide range of healthcare parameters. Due to the changes in impedance caused by either breathing or blood flow, time varying signals like respiration and cardiac output can be obtained with bioimpedance. A second application area is related to body composition and fluid status, e.g. pulmonary congestion monitoring in heart failure patients. Finally, bioimpedance can be used for continuous and real-time imaging, e.g., during mechanical ventilation. In this paper, we evaluate the use of wearable bioimpedance monitoring for application in chronic conditions, focusing on the current status, the recent improvements and the challenges that still need to be tackled.