Embedded Sensing and Computing Technologies for Wireless Health

Solving healthcare related problems is one of the grand challenges in the 21st century. In many nations, the need to improve existing medical and healthcare services is becoming increasingly important due primarily to the growing population and ageing society. The rapid advancement of sensors, computing and wireless communication technology has brought rise to a new research field called Wireless Health, which transforms health related services from the system based on episodic examination, disease diagnosis and treatment to one with continuous monitoring, disease prediction and prevention.In this thesis, I will summarize the projects in the Wireless Health research. They consist of different critical healthcare applications, from pressure ulcer prevention and gait analysis to non-contact cardiopulmonary monitoring and remote rehabilitation. Each project is conducted and presented in an end-to-end manner, including identifyingmedical problems, proposing solutions, developing systems and clinical verification. As for the technology development part, a few novel embedded sensing and computing technologies, including sensor system design, sensor modeling and sensor signal processing, will be discussed. The ultimate goal of this interdisciplinary researchis to proof the medical hypothesis, verify the feasibility of technological solutions in clinics, and finally enable Wireless Health from concept to practice