Tag: Air pollution

Implementation of wearable sensors in different sectors

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Recently there has been an  upsurge of usage of wearable sensors in many applications such as medical, entertainment, security, and commercial fields. They can be extremely useful in providing accurate and reliable information on people’s activities and behaviours, thereby ensuring a safe living environment. It may be that the smart wearable sensors technology will revolutionize our life, social interaction and activities very much in the same way that personal computers have done a few decades back. They are widely used in fields such as:

  • Security:    Wearable sensors in the form of panic buttons for emergency help have been in use for a long time and are a huge commercial success. Of course for proper utilization the person needing help should be alert and fit enough to press the button. Most importantly, the panic button should be light in weight so that it is comfortable to wear 24/7.
  • Medical sciences:   Wearable sensors have become very popular, especially in the medical sciences, where there are a lot of different applications in monitoring physiological activities. In the medical field, it is possible to monitor patients’ body temperature, heart rate, brain activity, muscle motion and other critical data. It is important to have very light sensors that could be worn on the body to perform standard medical monitoring. It is possible to measure the blood pressure using wearable sensors through a modified volume-oscillometric technique which eliminates the need for an inflatable pressure cuff and using earphone and mobile device. The use of wearable sensors has made it possible to have the necessary treatment at home for patients after an attack of diseases such as heart-attacks, sleep apnea, Parkinson disease and so on. Patients after an operation usually go through the recovery/rehabilitation process where they follow a strict routine. All the physiological signals as well as physical activities of the patient are possible to be monitored with the help of wearable sensors. During the rehabilitation stage the wearable sensors may provide audio feedback, virtual reality images and other rehabilitative services. The system can be tuned to the requirement of individual patient. The whole activity can be monitored remotely by doctors, nurses or caregivers.
  • Sport/Training:    In the area of sport and training there is an increasing trend of using various wearable sensors. Something, for example, measurement of sweat rate which was possible only in the laboratory based system a few years back is now possible using wearable sensors.
  • Elderly support:    A significant amount of research is currently undergoing in the development of a smart sensing system to detect falls of elderly within the home. Falls are the single largest cause of injury in New Zealand  and it may be true for any other country. In New Zealand one in every three people over the age of sixty five years has a fall every year and it increases to one in two for the age of over eighty years. Falls may lead to several major health problems for the elderly and immediate help needs to be provided to reduce the risk of complications. In the absence of quick help, the elderly may suffer pain, go through emotional distress and even develop other medical complications such as dehydration, hypothermia and so on. The wearable smart panic button can also provide a mental peace to the elderly.
  • Air Pollution:   Air pollution exposure is an invisible hazard responsible for seven million premature deaths every year, according to World Health Organization estimates. But the new generation of wearable high-tech devices, paired with the mobile phones we carry, reveals this hazard so that users can see it in real-time. Personal environmental monitors measure air quality and other environmental data and stream that information to users who may otherwise have no idea what they are breathing. Armed with information, wearers might seek cleaner air by moving off a certain street or opening the window to a smoky room.
     

It is now an everyday news that the wearable electronics devices and technologies, such as heart rate monitors, smart watches, tracking devices (including PillCam) and smart glasses (google glass), etc. are experiencing a period of rapid growth. Future wearable technology reports that the wearable technologies will impact future medical technology, affecting our health and fitness decisions, deciding which park to go so the air is not polluted, redefining the doctor-patient relationship and reducing healthcare cost. Looking at the bigger picture, research points out that the wearable electronics technologies will undoubtedly continue to expand in consumer sectors.

Source: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6974987

Wearable pollution devices- useful only to make choices for our daily activities?

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Engineers have been designing and marketing small, wearable/portable pollution sensors for several years now.  The sensors are intended to inform the users about how pollution levels change as they change their location.

In fact, air pollution can differ drastically even from one neighbourhood to the next, said Michael Jerrett, chair of the department of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Depending on the type of pollution, you can see a lot of variability or change in the levels of pollution over very short distances,” he said. For example, a cyclist pedalling down a busy road might be exposed to five or even 10 times higher levels of ultrafine particles or carbon monoxide, thanks to traffic, than would a person in a neighbourhood just a few streets over.

Hence, there are practical choices that such sensors can help us make, such as where to go jogging or which parks to take children to play in. Wearable sensors could in theory be useful on a larger scientific scale as well, although the technology may require some improvements before it reaches that point. “I think that most people who work in environmental or spatial epidemiology would agree that the very best assessment you could get of someone’s exposure would be to have them carry a sensor on their person,” Jerrett said. “And to then know where they were and what they were doing, their activity level.”

Most studies of air pollution and premature mortality have tended to rely on models that take little information into account when it comes to the different neighbourhoods people go into on a day-to-day basis or their activity levels at the time. Researchers may be able to recruit large numbers of people to wear these types of sensors and take part in population-level studies, said Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, a research professor at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Spain. He has been involved with projects exploring the utility of personal sensors as part of the CITI-SENSE consortium, a collaboration involving several dozen European institutions aiming to develop community-based environmental monitoring projects. Nieuwenhuijsen said some personal sensors measure pollution concentrations “reasonably well,” and may be useful for the individual, but whether they would  be suitable for larger-scale research projects is still unclear.

“Most of them have not reached a level of precision that we would consider valid for research purposes,” Jerrett noted. For instance, certain factors, such as changes in humidity, are suspected to affect the way some sensors report pollution levels, he said.

“I would say that the current state of the science is there are some sensors that are good enough to detect changes in microenvironments,” he said. “But they do not line up as well as we’d like with a reference instrument that would cost $10,000 and require a lot of labour.” As the technology plays catch-up, Nieuwenhuijsen pointed out that there are other issues to be aware of.

“What you have to be careful of is to put too much responsibility on the individual,” he said. Wearable pollution sensors might allow people to make more informed choices about their daily activities, but policymakers still need to look at pollution through a bigger lens and put measures in place to protect whole cities or regions. In other words, action should be “more on a community basis than an individual basis,” he said.

By designing a wearable pollution device that changes its colour based on the pollution level of the area you are walking in, the invisible is made visible to both individuals and environment-related policymakers. Hence, the burden of actions being taken belongs to both individuals (they decide which place to go based on the colour of their costumes) and institutions (as soon as a lot of red costumes are seen in an area, this is a clear indication  that  environmental measures should be taken within that area). Thus, such wearable devices not only affect people’s daily decisions, but can raise awareness among environmental policymakers as well.