Preliminary guidelines to build a wearable health monitoring system for patients: Focusing on a wearable device with a wig

Abstract

We have previously developed a wearable health monitoring system embedded in a wig. In this paper we introduce our system and derive preliminary guidelines to build such wearable devices for healthcare purposes. The major goal of the system is to monitor and detect falling in addition to measuring heart rate, body temperature, and current location of a patient who is wearing the device, and send text messages to pre-configured recipients in emergency. Preliminary guidelines were developed using a focused group interview with healthcare experts, which include form factor, wearing area, motivation, target, and additional functions. We are currently in the process of developing an improved device based on the derived insights.