In modern hospitals, monitoring patients’ vital signs and other biomedical signals is standard practice. With the advent of data-driven healthcare, Internet of medical things, wearable technologies, and machine learning, we expect this to accelerate and to be used in new and promising ways, including early warning systems and precision diagnostics. Hence, we see an ever-increasing need for retrieving, storing, and managing the large amount of biomedical signal data generated. The popularity of standards, such as HL7 FHIR for interoperability and data transfer, have also resulted in their use as a data storage model, which is inefficient. This article raises concern about the inefficiency of using FHIR for storage of biomedical signals and instead highlights the possibility of a sustainable storage based on data compression. Most reported efforts have focused on ECG signals; however, many other typical biomedical signals are understudied. In this article, we are considering arterial blood pressure, photoplethysmography, and respiration. We focus on simple lossless compression with low implementation complexity, low compression delay, and good compression ratios suitable for wide adoption. Our results show that it is easy to obtain a compression ratio of 2.7:1 for arterial blood pressure, 2.9:1 for photoplethysmography, and 4.1:1 for respiration.

Work metabolism (WM) can be accurately estimated by oxygen consumption (VO2), which is commonly assessed by heart rate (HR) in field studies. However, the VO2–HR relationship is influenced by individual capacity and activity characteristics. The purpose of this study was to evaluate three models for estimating WM compared with indirect calorimetry, during simulated work activities. The techniques were: the HR-Flex model; HR branched model, combining HR with hip-worn accelerometers (ACC); and HR + arm-leg ACC model, combining HR with wrist- and thigh-worn ACC. Twelve participants performed five simulated work activities and three submaximal tests. The HR + arm-leg ACC model had the overall best performance with limits of agreement (LoA) of −3.94 and 2.00 mL/min/kg, while the HR-Flex model had −5.01 and 5.36 mL/min/kg and the branched model, −6.71 and 1.52 mL/min/kg. In conclusion, the HR + arm-leg ACC model should, when feasible, be preferred in wearable systems for WM estimation.

Preventive healthcare has attracted much attention recently. Improving people's lifestyles and promoting a healthy diet and wellbeing are important, but the importance of work-related diseases should not be undermined. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are among the most common work-related health problems. Ergonomists already assess MSD risk factors and suggest changes in workplaces. However, existing methods are mainly based on visual observations, which have a relatively low reliability and cover only part of the workday. These suggestions concern the overall workplace and the organization of work, but rarely includes individuals' work techniques. In this work, we propose a precise and pervasive ergonomic platform for continuous risk assessment. The system collects data from wearable sensors, which are synchronized and processed by a mobile computing layer, from which exposure statistics and risk assessments may be drawn, and finally, are stored at the server layer for further analyses at both individual and group levels. The platform also enables continuous feedback to the worker to support behavioral changes. The deployed cloud platform in Amazon Web Services instances showed sufficient system flexibility to affordably fulfill requirements of small to medium enterprises, while it is expandable for larger corporations. The system usability scale of 76.6 indicates an acceptable grade of usability.

Neuromorphic computing, as a new paradigm, highlighted for its highly parallel, energy efficient features, has attracted a lot of attention. The hardware implementation for a neuromorphic system proposes the strong desire for suitable building blocks. The synaptic device is a very promising solution because of its stimulation-history-related response, which fits the nature of a neural network. In this work, an artificial synapse based on a memristive transistor fabricated by a simple process is realized. The device not only shows multi-level states which is the main feature of a memristor and is essential to hardware implementation neuromorphic system, but also exhibits physical flexibility, a feature that supports wearable and portable electronics. On this basis, a proof-of-feasibility simulation using the experimental data is performed to realize the pattern classification.

The requirement of information acquisition and processing is growing rapidly. However, existing systems either suffering from inadequate processing ability or from architecture limitations being restricted by the data sensing and transmission process. In this work, a novel photoelectrical artificial synapse is developed to settle down these issues by proposing a new possibility of having a photoelectrical neuromorphic network. The photoelectrical artificial synapse has both light sensing and non-volatile multilevel states making it a suitable candidate as building block in a sensing-processing merged and photoelectrical- enabled neuromorphic system. The device also has physical flexibility to adapt to flexible and wearable systems. This work initiates a new area of novel artificial synapses and neuromorphic networks.

The flexible electronics has been deemed to be a promising approach to the wearable electronic systems. However, the mismatching between the existing flexible devices and the conventional computing paradigm results an impasse in this field. In this work, a new way to access to this goal is proposed by combining flexible devices and the neuromorphic architecture together. To achieve that, a high-performance flexible artificial synapse is created based on a carefully designed and optimized memristive transistor. The device exhibits high-performance which has near-linear non-volatile resistance change under 10,000 identical pulse signals within the 515% dynamic range, and has the energy consumption as low as 45 fJ per pulse. It also displays multiple synaptic plasticity features, which demonstrates its potential for real-time online learning. Besides, the adaptability by virtue of its three-terminal structure specifically contributes its improved uniformity, repeatability, and reduced power consumption. This work offers a very viable solution for the future wearable computing.

Neuromorphic computing, i.e., brainlike computing, has attracted a great deal of attention because of its exceptional performance. For the hardware implementation of neuromorphic systems, the desired key building blocks, artificial synapses, have been intensively investigated recently. However, many issues, such as the small state number, low reliability, and high energy consumption, have complicated the path to real applications. Therefore, methods that can improve the performance of the artificial synapses are highly desired. Although different artificial synapses have diverse working mechanisms, universal opti- mization strategies that can be applied to most three-terminal field-effect-transistor-type artificial synapses are proposed in this paper. Instead ofwasting the third terminal in the device structure, the working condition can be effectively tuned by this third terminal. The key parameters, such as the gate electric field intensity and distribution, can be adjusted, and the performance is thereby tuned. In this manner, multiple performance metrics are optimized, such as the current change per pulse (ΔI), the linearity, the uniformity, and the power consumption. The mechanisms behind these strategies are also investigated to strengthen the effectiveness. This paper will push the performance of the current artificial synapses to a new level.

Vehicle crashes lead to huge economic and social consequences, and one non-negligible cause of accident is driver sleepiness. Driver sleepiness analysis based on the monitoring of vehicle acceleration, steering and deviation from the road or physiological and behavioral monitoring of the driver, e.g., monitoring of yawning, head pose, eye blinks and eye closures, electroencephalogram, electrooculogram, electromyogram and electrocardiogram (ECG), have been used as a part of sleepiness alert systems. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a potential method for monitoring of driver sleepiness. Despite previous positive reports from the use of HRV for sleepiness detection, results are often inconsistent between studies. In this work, we have re-evaluated the feasibility of using HRV for detecting drivers’ sleepiness during real road driving. A database consists of ECG measurements from 10 drivers, driving during morning, afternoon and night sessions on real road were used. Drivers have reported their average sleepiness level by using the Karolinska sleepiness scale once every five minutes. Statistical analysis was performed to evaluate the potential of HRV indexes to distinguish between alert, first signs of sleepiness and severe sleepiness states. The results suggest that individual subjects show different reactions to sleepiness, which produces an individual change in HRV indicators. The results motivate future work for more personalized approaches in sleepiness detection.

We investigate a generic fabric material as basis for resistive pressure and bio-impedance sensors and apply the fabric in a shirt collar for swallowing spotting. A pilot study confirmed the signal performance of both sensor types.