NOTE: This blog post may get updated with additional future research!
The literature review from last year analyses the smartwatch market and created surveys to check if such a device would have a chance of survival and a reason for its existence, together with the many features current smartwatches employ, and what can be added going forward from here.
As specified, the point of my device is to create a "personal medic" device, always present on the wrist of the wearer, and always able to offer personalised information from the wearer's environment and the wearer themselves. This blog post will be continously updated with relevant research liteterature in the medical field.
Going forward, it is important to check research papers submitted on similar devices and their perspectives.
The article "Health at hand: A systematic review of smart watch uses for health and wellness" , available at "https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1532046416301137", talks about the potential of smartwatches to assess wearer's health and send that information to the right service providers. The paper also analysis the possibility and success rate of such a device applied to ICU/PCR Nursing applications.
My device will offer a more in depth check of the wearer's health and what might have affected it based on its environment, a highly advanced analytical tool, however the data will be provided directly to the user and not sent to any service providers, as the purposes of the watch is to be fully offline.
Furthermore, the article "Healthcare Applications of Smart Watches" , available at: "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5052554/", performs a similar systematic review of published papers regarding the usage of smartwatches for disease monitoring and their success rate.
The following paragrams is of great importance as it talks about the necessary steps to bring smartwatches further in the medical field: "For practical use, Zhang’s research group noted several key factors that should be developed in order to implement wearable devices, including miniaturization, integration, networking, digitalization, and standardization. To be comfortably worn on the body, miniaturization and unobtrusiveness are considered the most important factors that can increase compliance for long-term and continuous monitoring. A recent advent to the fast-growing market of wearable devices is the smart watch. With its miniaturized form factor design and computing technology, a smart watch can be worn continuously without interrupting the user’s daily activity. Although smart phones have become a part of our daily lives and might be considered to be wearable, these devices most often resides in a pocket or purse. Unlike smart phones, smart watches can be truly wearable without interrupting our daily lives, and can also serve as a readily accessible extension of the smart phone. Because of the proximity to the skin, the smart watch can also be a source of physiological data derived directly from the wearer‘s body. With the potential for widespread adoption in the healthcare sector, smart watches equipped with biosensors have the potential to provide important healthcare information to patients and their providers."
I would consider this article useful as it can demonstrate what future advancements can be added to my device to increase its capabilities and medical potential.