Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death globally. An effective strategy to mitigate the burden of CVDs has been to monitor patients’ biomedical variables during daily activities with wearable technology. Nowadays, technological advance has contributed to wearables technology by reducing the size of the devices, improving the accuracy of sensing biomedical variables to be devices with relatively low energy consumption that can manage security and privacy of the patient’s medical information, have adaptability to any data storage system, and have reasonable costs with regard to the traditional scheme where the patient must go to a hospital for an electrocardiogram, thus contributing a serious option in diagnosis and treatment of CVDs. In this work, we review commercial and noncommercial wearable devices used to monitor CVD biomedical variables. Our main findings revealed that commercial wearables usually include smart wristbands, patches, and smartwatches, and they generally monitor variables such as heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, and electrocardiogram data. Noncommercial wearables focus on monitoring electrocardiogram and photoplethysmography data, and they mostly include accelerometers and smartwatches for detecting atrial fibrillation and heart failure. However, using wearable devices without healthy personal habits will cause disappointing results in the patient’s health.

Energy efficiency has aroused great interest in research worldwide, because energy consumption has increased in recent years, especially in the residential sector. The advances in energy conversion, along with new forms of communication, and information technologies have paved the way for what is now known as smart homes. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the convergence of various heterogeneous technologies from different application domains that are used to interconnect things through the Internet, thus allowing for the detection, monitoring, and remote control of multiple devices. Home automation systems (HAS) combined with IoT, big data technologies, and machine learning are alternatives that promise to contribute to greater energy efficiency. This work presents HEMS-IoT, a big data and machine learning-based smart home energy management system for home comfort, safety, and energy saving. We used the J48 machine learning algorithm and Weka API to learn user behaviors and energy consumption patterns and classify houses with respect to energy consumption. Likewise, we relied on RuleML and Apache Mahout to generate energy-saving recommendations based on user preferences to preserve smart home comfort and safety. To validate our system, we present a case study where we monitor a smart home to ensure comfort and safety and reduce energy consumption.

The growth of health care spending on older adults with chronic diseases faces major concerns that require effective measures to be adopted worldwide. Among the main concerns is whether recent technological advances now offer the possibility of providing remote health care for the aging population. The benefits of suitable prevention and adequate monitoring of chronic diseases by using emerging technological paradigms such as wearable devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) can increase the detection rates of health risks to raise the quality of life for the elderly. Specifically, on the subject of remote health monitoring in older adults, a first approach is required to review devices, sensors, and wearables that serve as tools for obtaining and measuring physiological parameters in order to identify progress, limitations, and areas of opportunity in the development of health monitoring schemes. For these reasons, a review of articles on wearable devices was presented in the first instance to identify whether the selected articles addressed the needs of aged adults. Subsequently, the direct review of commercial and prototype wearable devices with the capability to read physiological parameters was presented to identify whether they are optimal or usable for health monitoring in older adults.