A review of wearable sensors and systems with application in rehabilitation

The US health care system faces daunting challenges. With the improvements in health care in the last few decades, residents of industrialized countries are now living longer, but with multiple, often complex, health conditions [1-3]. Survival from acute trauma has also improved, but this is associated with an increase in the number of individuals with severe disabilities [4]. From an epidemiological standpoint, the cohort of "baby boomers" in the US is now reaching an age at which they will begin to severely stress the Medicare system. Finally, recent health care reform efforts may add 32 million newly insured patients to the health care system in the next few years [5].These altered demographics raise some fundamental questions？ How do we care for an increasing number of individuals with complex medical conditions?？ How do we provide quality care to those in areas with reduced access to providers?？ How do we maximize the independence and participation of an increasing number of individuals with disabilities?Cleary, answers to these questions will be complex and will require changes into how we organize and pay for health care. However, part of the solution may lie in how and to what extent we take advantage of recent advances in information technology and related fields. Currently, there exist technologies that hold great promise to expand the capabilities of the health care system, extending its range into the community, improving diagnostics and monitoring, and maximizing the independence and participation of individuals. This paper will discuss these technologies in depth, with a focus on remote monitoring systems based on wearable technology. We chose to focus on these technologies because recent developments in wearable sensor systems have led to a number of exciting clinical applications.Wearable sensors have diagnostic, as well as monitoring applications. Their current capabilities include physiological and biochemical sensing, as well as motion sensing [6,