Developing a Smartwatch-Based Healthcare Application: Notes to Consider - PubMed (original) (raw)
Developing a Smartwatch-Based Healthcare Application: Notes to Consider
Ramin Ramezani et al. Sensors (Basel). 2023.
Abstract
Wearable devices and fitness trackers have gained popularity in healthcare and telemedicine as tools to reduce hospitalization costs, improve personalized health management, and monitor patients in remote areas. Smartwatches, particularly, offer continuous monitoring capabilities through step counting, heart rate tracking, and activity monitoring. However, despite being recognized as an emerging technology, the adoption of smartwatches in patient monitoring systems is still at an early stage, with limited studies delving beyond their feasibility. Developing healthcare applications for smartwatches faces challenges such as short battery life, wearable comfort, patient compliance, termination of non-native applications, user interaction difficulties, small touch screens, personalized sensor configuration, and connectivity with other devices. This paper presents a case study on designing an Android smartwatch application for remote monitoring of geriatric patients. It highlights obstacles encountered during app development and offers insights into design decisions and implementation details. The aim is to assist programmers in developing more efficient healthcare applications for wearable systems.
Keywords: Android; Wear OS; remote patient monitoring; smartwatch app; smartwatch application; telehealth; telemedicine.
Conflict of interest statement
R.R. and A.N. are cofounders of InvistaHealth LLC. Other authors have declared no potential conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.
Figures
Figure A1
Example Android studio java code to request and check for permission.
Figure A2
Example Android studio java code to setup foreground service.
Figure A3
Example Android studio java code to setup broadcast receiver.
Figure A4
Example Android studio java code to setup alarm to go off at the start of the next hour.
Figure A5
Sample binary file format to save disk space.
Figure 1
Potential usage of smartwatch sensors and antennas.
Figure 2
Overview of the system architecture of our proposed healthcare monitoring application.
Figure 3
The data collection application communicates its status such as application state, battery state, and network state to the administration application to determine the optimal timing for implementing remote configuration and software updates.
Figure 4
Illustration of doze mode implementation of Wear OS. The red section is when the CPU wakes up and runs all the pending tasks. The green section is when the CPU is put to sleep and ignores all tasks. The interval between the maintenance windows gets longer until the user interacts with the device again.
Figure 5
Detection characteristic of a smartwatch upon different number of beacons.
Figure 6
Decision rule to track users’ activity and location using the combination of accelerometer, gyroscope, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS sensors while minimizing power consumption.
Figure 7
The complete network communications between the administration app, the data collection app, and the remote server for the data collection app deployment, data uploading, and remote monitoring.
References
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