Wearable Sensors and Devices: Enhancing Human Life

Wearable sensors are changing almost every sector including healthcare, fitness, industrial, safety and even entertainment. These devices are intended to be comfortably affixed to the body and to continually monitor physiological, environmental and motion-related signals. This chapter first introduces the definition of wearable sensors/devices, including various hardware architectures and development platforms, and the differences from conventional sensors. There are currently thousands of different sensors available. For example, widely used gyroscope sensors, acceleration sensors, light sensors, temperature sensors, etc. These applications have been used in industrial, medical, aerospace and other fields. Data collection methods and machine learning (ML) techniques using wearable sensors today will also be described. The importance of low-power design, efficient data handling, integrating artificial intelligence into wearable sensors and the relationship to the Internet of Things (IoT) is explored. Finally, this chapter discusses the challenges and future of this quickly developing technology. At the end, we answer the question: will wearable sensors disappear in the future or will they be used more?