(1) Background: Continuous health promotion systems are increasingly important, enabling decentralized patient care, providing comfort, and reducing congestion in healthcare facilities. These systems allow for treatment beyond clinical settings and support preventive monitoring. Wearable systems have become essential tools for health monitoring, but they focus mainly on physiological data, overlooking motor data evaluation. The World Health Organization reports that 1.71 billion people globally suffer from musculoskeletal conditions, marked by pain and limited mobility. (2) Methods: To gain a deeper understanding of wearables for the motor rehabilitation, monitoring, and prediction of the progression and/or degradation of symptoms directly associated with upper-limb pathologies, this study was conducted. Thus, all articles indexed in the Web of Science database containing the terms “wearable”, “upper limb”, and (“rehabilitation” or “monitor” or “predict”) between 2019 and 2023 were flagged for analysis. (3) Results: Out of 391 papers identified, 148 were included and analyzed, exploring pathologies, technologies, and their interrelationships. Technologies were categorized by typology and primary purpose. (4) Conclusions: The study identified essential sensory units and actuators in wearable systems for upper-limb physiotherapy and analyzed them based on treatment methods and targeted pathologies.

The daily monitoring of the physiological parameters is essential for monitoring health condition and to prevent health problems. This is possible due to the democratization of numerous types of medical devices and promoted by the interconnection between these and smartphones. Nevertheless, medical devices that connect to smartphones are typically limited to manufacturers applications. This paper proposes an intelligent scanning system to simplify the collection of data displayed on different medical devices screens, recognizing the values, and optionally integrating them, through open protocols, with centralized databases. To develop this system, a dataset comprising 1614 images of medical devices was created, obtained from manufacturer catalogs, photographs and other public datasets. Then, three object detector algorithms (yolov3, Single-Shot Detector [SSD] 320 × 320 and SSD 640 × 640) were trained to detect digits and acronyms/units of measurements presented by medical devices. These models were tested under 3 different conditions to detect digits and acronyms/units as a single object (single label), digits and acronyms/units as independent objects (two labels), and digits and acronyms/units individually (fifteen labels). Models trained for single and two labels were completed with a convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify the detected objects. To group the recognized digits, a condition-tree based strategy on density spatial clustering was used. The most promising approach was the use of the SSD 640 × 640 for fifteen labels. Lastly, as future work, it is intended to convert this system to a mobile environment to accelerate and streamline the process of inserting data into mobile health (mhealth) applications.

With the growing number of patients living with chronic conditions, there is an increasing need for efficient systems that can automatically capture and convert medical device readings into digital data, particularly in home-based care settings. However, most home-based medical devices are closed systems that do not support straightforward automatic data export and often require complex connections to access or transmit patient information. Since most of these devices display clinical information on a screen, this research explores how a standard smartphone camera, combined with artificial intelligence, can be used to automatically extract the displayed data in a simple and non-intrusive way. In particular, this study provides a comparative analysis of several You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) models to evaluate their effectiveness in detecting and recognizing the readings on medical device displays. In addition to these comparisons, we also explore a hybrid approach that combines the YOLOv8l model for object detection with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for classification. Several iterations of the aforementioned models were tested, using image resolutions of 320 × 320 and 640 × 640. The performance was assessed using metrics such as precision, recall, mean average precision at 0.5 Intersection over Union (mAP@50), and frames per second (FPS). The results show that YOLOv8l (640) achieved the highest mAP@50 of 0.979, but at a lower inference speed (13.20 FPS), while YOLOv8n (320) offered the fastest inference (129.79 FPS) with a reduction in mean average precision (0.786). Combining YOLOv8l with a CNN classifier resulted in a slight reduction in overall accuracy (0.96) when compared to the standalone model (0.98). While the results are promising, the study acknowledges certain limitations, including dataset-specific biases, controlled acquisition settings, and challenges in adapting to real-world scenarios. Nevertheless, the comparative analysis offers valuable insights into the trade-off between inference time and accuracy, helping guide the selection of the most suitable model based on the specific demands of the intended scanning application.