Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a pandemic since early 2020. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has already caused more than three million deaths worldwide and affected people's physical and mental health. COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms are generally required to self-isolate and monitor for symptoms at least for 14 days in the case the disease turns towards severe complications. In this work, we overviewed the impact of COVID-19 on the patients' general health with a focus on their cardiovascular, respiratory and mental health, and investigated several existing patient monitoring systems. We addressed the limitations of these systems and proposed a wearable telehealth solution for monitoring a set of physiological parameters that are critical for COVID-19 patients such as body temperature, heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and cough. This physiological information can be further combined to potentially estimate the lung function using artificial intelligence (AI) and sensor fusion techniques. The prototype, which includes the hardware and a smartphone app, showed promising results with performance comparable to or better than similar commercial devices, thus potentially making the proposed system an ideal wearable solution for long-term monitoring of COVID-19 patients and other chronic diseases.

Wearable health monitoring devices allow for measuring physiological parameters without restricting individuals’ daily activities, providing information that is reflective of an individual’s health and well-being. However, these systems need to be accurate, power-efficient, unobtrusive and simple to use to enable a reliable, convenient, automatic and ubiquitous means of long-term health monitoring. One such system can be embedded in an insole to obtain physiological data from the plantar aspect of the foot that can be analyzed to gain insight into an individual’s health. This manuscript provides a comprehensive review of insole-based sensor systems that measure a variety of parameters useful for overall health monitoring, with a focus on insole-based PPD measurement systems developed in recent years. Existing solutions are reviewed, and several open issues are presented and discussed. The concept of a fully integrated insole-based health monitoring system and considerations for future work are described. By developing a system that is capable of measuring parameters such as PPD, gait characteristics, foot temperature and heart rate, a holistic understanding of an individual’s health and well-being can be obtained without interrupting day-to-day activities. The proposed device can have a multitude of applications, such as for pathology detection, tracking medical conditions and analyzing gait characteristics.

This meta-analysis and systematic review, conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines, explores the efficacy of cuff-less blood pressure (BP) monitoring methods, particularly focusing on photoplethysmogram-based technologies. This comprehensive analysis carefully searched prominent databases such as MEDLINE, PubMed, AMED, Embase, and IEEE-Xplore, encompassing 25 studies with a collective participant pool of 21,142 individuals. The study primarily investigates the accuracy and practicality of continuous BP estimation devices and algorithms, aiming to assess their suitability for daily or long-term, as well as their applicability and usability across a broad population. The mean disparities were 4.14 mmHg for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and 2.79 mmHg for diastolic blood pressure (DBP), highlighting a close congruence with established measurement techniques. An in-depth analysis into specific methodologies reveals that Pulse Waveform Analysis (PWA) demonstrates a more favorable performance compared to Pulse Wave Velocity (PWV) for both SBP and DBP, although these differences are not statistically significant. The findings indicate a promising future for wearable devices in short-term BP monitoring scenarios. Both PWA and PWV methods in wearable formats have shown considerable potential as effective tools for BP assessment. However, the study underscores the need for further research, particularly targeting hypertensive populations, to validate the long-term effectiveness and reliability of these wearables. Finally, this investigation is crucial for establishing the role of wearables in ongoing, reliable BP monitoring, especially when considered in conjunction with other health monitoring technologies.