Current progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to a base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments.

Wearable sensors and healthcare devices use small lightweight batteries to power their operations of monitoring and tracking. It becomes absolutely vital to effectively utilise all the available battery charge for device longevity between charges. The electrochemical recovery effect enables the extraction of more power from the battery when implementing idle times in between use cycles, and has been used to develop various power management techniques. However, there is no evidence concerning the actual increase in available power that can be attained using the recovery effect. Also, this property cannot be generalised on all the battery chemistries since it is an innate phenomenon, relying on the anode/cathode material. Indeed recent developments suggest that recovery effect does not exist at all. Experimental results to verify the presence and level of the recovery effect in commonly used battery chemistries in wearable sensors and healthcare devices are presented. The results have revealed that the recovery effect significantly does exist in certain batteries, and importantly the authors show that it is also comprised of two different time constants. This novel finding has important implications for the development of power management techniques that utilise the recovery effect with application in a large range of battery devices.

To be successful, hand exoskeletons require customisable low encumbrance design with multi-compliant materials. This paper details the modification and testing of a fused filament fabrication printer to produce three categories of multi-compliant material that can be incorporated into the design of hand exoskeletons. Demonstration of the multi-compliant material for some common problems in hand exoskeleton design are presented. This method of manufacturing multi-compliant materials could result in widespread use of exoskeleton design in both the rehabilitation and assistive fields.

Small embedded systems, in our case wearable healthcare devices, have significant engineering challenges to reduce their power consumption for longer battery life, while at the same time supporting ever-increasing processing requirements for more intelligent applications. Research has primarily focused on achieving lower power operation through hardware designs and intelligent methods of scheduling software tasks, all with the objective of minimizing the overall consumed electrical power. However, such an approach inevitably creates points in time where software tasks and peripherals coincide to draw large peaks of electrical current, creating short-term electrical stress for the battery and power regulators, and adding to electromagnetic interference emissions. This position paper proposes that the power profile of an embedded device using a real-time operating system (RTOS) will significantly benefit if the task scheduler is modified to be informed of the electrical current profile required for each task. This enables the task scheduler to schedule tasks that require large amounts of current to be spread over time, thus constraining the peak current that the system will draw. We propose a solution to inform the task scheduler of a tasks’ power profile, and we discuss our application scenario, which clearly benefited from the proposal.