Wearable devices have seen tremendous growth over the last 1
0 years. This has been made
possible with the ever-shrinking electronics, reduction i
n costs as well as the rise in mobile
computing making it possible to share significant computati
onal workload. Recent estimates
show an annual growth of 17% in wearable devices in the year 20
17 with over 300 million
devices being sold. It is also projected that over 500 millio
n devices will be sold by the year
2021 [1]. While these figures show some staggering growth and p
otential for wearable devices,
a detailed look at the numbers reveal that the application ar
eas where wearable devices have
been a success are quite limited. Most of these devices which
are considered
wearable
, take
the form of smartwatches, fitness trackers, body worn camera
s and headphones. It should be
emphasized that the mentioned numbers are for devices that a
re made for consumers and used
mostly for entertainment, wellness and general health purp
oses. The benefits provided by most
of these health-related wearable devices are insufficient f
or medical usage mainly because of
low quality data and insufficient accuracy in classification
tasks.
While wearables for consumer use will continue to grow, it is i
mportant to keep in mind
the distinction between consumer and medical-grade device
s. In the sphere of medical devices,
wearables for monitoring, diagnosing and real-time manage
ment of illnesses is still at a very
early stage. One of the main reasons for this slow growth, as w
ell as adoption, is the design
of such devices, which is inherently very challenging. In th
is paper, we will first look at the
need for wearable devices to improve healthcare in order to u
nderstand and define a set of requirements for the design of such devices. Subsequently,
based on these requirements, we will
look at the challenges that exist in the development of weara
ble medical devices particularly
from the perspective of their system and circuit level imple
mentations.