Wearable Devices for Physical Monitoring of Heart: A Review

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death globally. An effective strategy to mitigate the burden of CVDs has been to monitor patients’ biomedical variables during daily activities with wearable technology. Nowadays, technological advance has contributed to wearables technology by reducing the size of the devices, improving the accuracy of sensing biomedical variables to be devices with relatively low energy consumption that can manage security and privacy of the patient’s medical information, have adaptability to any data storage system, and have reasonable costs with regard to the traditional scheme where the patient must go to a hospital for an electrocardiogram, thus contributing a serious option in diagnosis and treatment of CVDs. In this work, we review commercial and noncommercial wearable devices used to monitor CVD biomedical variables. Our main findings revealed that commercial wearables usually include smart wristbands, patches, and smartwatches, and they generally monitor variables such as heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, and electrocardiogram data. Noncommercial wearables focus on monitoring electrocardiogram and photoplethysmography data, and they mostly include accelerometers and smartwatches for detecting atrial fibrillation and heart failure. However, using wearable devices without healthy personal habits will cause disappointing results in the patient’s health.