Wearable Medical Devices: High-Level System Design Considerations and Tradeoffs

Wearable devices have seen tremendous growth during the last ten years. This has been made possible with ever-shrinking electronics, cost reductions, and the rise in mobile computing, making it possible to share significant computational workloads. Recent estimates show an annual growth of 17% in wearable devices in 2017, with more than 300 million devices sold. It is also projected that more than 500 million devices will be sold by the year 2021 [1]. Although these figures show some staggering growth and potential for wearable devices, a detailed look at the numbers reveals that the application areas where wearable devices have been a success are quite limited. Most of the devices considered wearable take the form of smart watches, fitness trackers, body-worn cameras, and headphones. It should be emphasized that the mentioned numbers are for devices that are made for consumers and used mostly for entertainment, wellness, and general health purposes. The benefits provided by most of the health-related wearable devices are insufficient for medical use mainly because of low-quality data and insufficient accuracy in classification tasks.