Wearable sensing devices have become very popular for consumer health and fitness monitoring in the private sector. It is quite obvious that a mass of people in need of daily care, rehabilitation interventions, or patients with chronic diseases can also benefit from being monitored by smart wearables. We have developed a wearable sensor platform that was and is successfully applied for two different e-health applications, i.e. home rehabilitation after stroke and control of asthma patients respectively asthma control. In the stroke rehabilitation setting, we have been able to assess the effectiveness of ambulant therapy by analyzing motor skills during daily life activities. The progress of rehabilitation state can be documented by statistics about usage of upper limbs yet up to the point of comparing affected versus not-affected limbs.
For smart asthma control we develop prototypes of novel devices that collect insights of inhaler usages/medication in correlation to medication intakes, personal activities as well as environmental effects of the actual surroundings. Given that about 50 % of asthma patients are not well controlled, we expect boosting patient’s self-management capabilities by automated feedback and guiding features for disease control on 24/7 basis. Likewise we assume a monitoring of inhaler use allows physicians for much better dosing medications to prevent from risky over- or underspending of medication intake. Promising measurement results of laboratory settings are currently transferred into real-world prototypes.