Continuous health monitoring: An opportunity for precision health

Continuous health monitoring and integrated diagnostic devices, worn on the body and used in the home, will help to identify and prevent early manifestations of disease. However, challenges lie ahead in validating new health monitoring technologies and in optimizing data analytics to extract actionable conclusions from continuously obtained health data.

Long-term cyclic use of a sample collector for toilet-based urine analysis

Urine analysis via a toilet-based device can enable continuous health monitoring, a transformation away from hospital-based care towards more proactive medicine. To enable reliable sample collection for a toilet-attached analyzer, here a novel sample collector is proposed. The applicability of the proposed sample collector is validated for long-term use. Geometric parameters of the 3D-printed sample collector are optimized. The collected and leftover volumes are quantified for a range of urination speeds and design parameters. For long-term cyclic use, the protein concentrations of samples are quantified and the effectiveness of washing the sample collector is assessed.

Sensing Platforms for Prototyping and Experimenting Wearable Continuous Health Monitoring Systems

Continuous monitoring generally imposes a set of constraints including form factor, energy consumption, and mobility support in order to enable anywhere and anytime monitoring. Sensors, within this context, play an important role as the first building block of such systems and the main entry point for the monitoring process. Therefore, to experiment continuous health-monitoring systems in real-like conditions, sensing platforms need to meet a number of related requirements and constraints, especially for mobility factor. This chapter aims to present an overview of popular sensing platforms meeting appropriate constraints, allowing experimenters and researchers to start prototyping and experimentation projects for continuous health monitoring. For that, a number of requirements and constraints for continuous monitoring prototyping are firstly identified, then sensing platforms are classified into three proposed and compared categories, namely, ready-to-use, ready-to-compose kits, and do-it-yourself platforms. On that basis, a set of interesting platforms are reviewed and compared under each category.