Abstract
Chronic and age-related diseases are posing great challenges on the present healthcare system in the developed and developing countries. To lower the cost and improve the efficiency and quality of the current healthcare delivery, health informatics has emerged as a new field of study that is anticipated to transform the current hospital-centered medical system into a p-Health or 6-P's health model. One of the technological challenges in developing p-health system is to advance innovative sensing technologies for the acquisition of multi-scale and multimodal health information. In this review, we mainly focus on the two types of sensing technologies, i.e., biosensing and wearable sensing, to acquire a multi-scale set of health information from the genetic and molecular level to the body system level. Firstly, we address the current state of point-of-care bio-sensing technology for rapid and high-sensitivity biomarker detection. Some critical challenges and enabling technologies such as microfluidic technology for sample processing and nanotechnology for high-sensitivity detection will be discussed. Then the state-of-the-art of wearable sensing systems which aim to provide continuous physiological monitoring and long-term tracking of the chronic diseases will be presented. Major challenges in the development of wearable sensing systems including continuous and noninvasive sensing, motion artifacts cancellation, and the low power, low frequency and low noise integrated circuit design will be discussed. These sensing technology advancements are essential to the realization of the future p-Health model.
