The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc globally and still persists even after a year of its initial outbreak. Several reasons can be considered: people are in close contact with each other, i.e., at a short range (1 m), and the healthcare system is not sufficiently developed or does not have enough facilities to manage and fight the pandemic, even in developed countries such as the USA and the U.K. and countries in Europe. There is a great need in healthcare for remote monitoring of COVID-19 symptoms. In the past year, a number of IoT-based devices and wearables have been introduced by researchers, providing good results in terms of high accuracy in diagnosing patients in the prodromal phase and in monitoring the symptoms of patients, i.e., respiratory rate, heart rate, temperature, etc. In this systematic review, we analyzed these wearables and their need in the healthcare system. The research was conducted using three databases: IEEE Xplore^®, Web of Science^®, and PubMed Central^®, between December 2019 and June 2021. This article was based on the PRISMA guidelines. Initially, 1100 articles were identified while searching the scientific literature regarding this topic. After screening, ultimately, 70 articles were fully evaluated and included in this review. These articles were divided into two categories. The first one belongs to the on-body sensors (wearables), their types and positions, and the use of AI technology with ehealth wearables in different scenarios from screening to contact tracing. In the second category, we discuss the problems and solutions with respect to utilizing these wearables globally. This systematic review provides an extensive overview of wearable systems for the remote management and automated assessment of COVID-19, taking into account the reliability and acceptability of the implemented technologies.

Today, ensuring work safety is considered to be one of the top priorities for various industries. Workplace injuries, illnesses, and deaths often entail substantial production and financial losses, governmental checks, series of dismissals, and loss of reputation. Wearable devices are one of the technologies that flourished with the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0, allowing employers to monitor and maintain safety at workplaces. The purpose of this article is to systematize knowledge in the field of industrial wearables’ safety to assess the relevance of their use in enterprises as the technology maintaining occupational safety, to correlate the benefits and costs of their implementation, and, by identifying research gaps, to outline promising directions for future work in this area. We categorize industrial wearable functions into four classes (monitoring, supporting, training, and tracking) and provide a classification of the metrics collected by wearables to better understand the potential role of wearable technology in preserving workplace safety. Furthermore, we discuss key communication technologies and localization techniques utilized in wearable-based work safety solutions. Finally, we analyze the main challenges that need to be addressed to further enable and support the use of wearable devices for industrial work safety.

The 3D image segmentation is the process of partitioning a digital 3D volumes into multiple segments. This paper presents a fully automatic method for high resolution 3D volumetric segmentation of medical image data using modern supervised deep learning approach. We introduce 3D Dense-U-Net neural network architecture implementing densely connected layers. It has been optimized for graphic process unit accelerated high resolution image processing on currently available hardware (Nvidia GTX 1080ti). The method has been evaluated on MRI brain 3D volumetric dataset and CT thoracic scan dataset for spine segmentation. In contrast with many previous methods, our approach is capable of precise segmentation of the input image data in the original resolution, without any pre-processing of the input image. It can process image data in 3D and has achieved accuracy of 99.72% on MRI brain dataset, which outperformed results achieved by human expert. On lumbar and thoracic vertebrae CT dataset it has achieved the accuracy of 99.80%. The architecture proposed in this paper can also be easily applied to any task already using U-Net network as a segmentation algorithm to enhance its results. Complete source code was released online under open-source license.