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  1. Biopotential electrodes play an integral role within smart wearables and clothing in capturing vital signals like electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyogram (EMG), and electroencephalogram (EEG). This study focuses on dry e-textile electrodes (E1–E6) and a laser-cut knit electrode (E7), to assess their impedance characteristics under varying contact forces and moisture conditions. Synthetic perspiration was applied using a moisture management tester and impedance was measured before and after exposure, followed by a 24 h controlled drying period. Concurrently, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the dry electrode was evaluated during ECG data collection on a healthy participant. Our findings revealed that, prior to moisture exposure, the impedance of electrodes E7, E5, and E2 was below 200 ohm, dropping to below 120 ohm post-exposure. Embroidered electrodes E6 and E4 exhibited an over 25% decrease in mean impedance after moisture exposure, indicating the impact of stitch design and moisture on impedance. Following the controlled drying, certain electrodes (E1, E2, E3, and E4) experienced an over 30% increase in mean impedance. Overall, knit electrode E7, and embroidered electrodes E2 and E6, demonstrated superior performance in terms of impedance, moisture retention, and ECG signal quality, revealing promising avenues for future biopotential electrode designs. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 1, 2024
  2. Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological progressive movement disorder, affecting more than 10 million people globally. PD demands a longitudinal assessment of symptoms to monitor the disease progression and manage the treatments. Existing assessment methods require patients with PD (PwPD) to visit a clinic every 3–6 months to perform movement assessments conducted by trained clinicians. However, periodic visits pose barriers as PwPDs have limited mobility, and healthcare cost increases. Hence, there is a strong demand for using telemedicine technologies for assessing PwPDs in remote settings. In this work, we present an in-home telemedicine kit, named iTex (intelligent Textile), which is a patient-centered design to carry out accessible tele-assessments of movement symptoms in people with PD. iTex is composed of a pair of smart textile gloves connected to a customized embedded tablet. iTex gloves are integrated with flex sensors on the fingers and inertial measurement unit (IMU) and have an onboard microcontroller unit with IoT (Internet of Things) capabilities including data storage and wireless communication. The gloves acquire the sensor data wirelessly to monitor various hand movements such as finger tapping, hand opening and closing, and other movement tasks. The gloves are connected to a customized tablet computer acting as an IoT device, configured to host a wireless access point, and host an MQTT broker and a time-series database server. The tablet also employs a patient-centered interface to guide PwPDs through the movement exam protocol. The system was deployed in four PwPDs who used iTex at home independently for a week. They performed the test independently before and after medication intake. Later, we performed data analysis of the in-home study and created a feature set. The study findings reported that the iTex gloves were capable to collect movement-related data and distinguish between pre-medication and post-medication cases in a majority of the participants. The IoT infrastructure demonstrated robust performance in home settings and offered minimum barriers for the assessment exams and the data communication with a remote server. In the post-study survey, all four participants expressed that the system was easy to use and poses a minimum barrier to performing the test independently. The present findings indicate that the iTex glove system has the potential for periodic and objective assessment of PD motor symptoms in remote settings. 
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  3. Functional connectivity between the brain and body kinematics has largely not been investigated due to the requirement of motionlessness in neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, this connectivity is disrupted in many neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson’s Disease (PD), a neurological progressive disorder characterized by movement symptoms including slowness of movement, stiffness, tremors at rest, and walking and standing instability. In this study, brain activity is recorded through functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG), and body kinematics were captured by a motion capture system (Mocap) based on an inertial measurement unit (IMU) for gross movements (large movements such as limb kinematics), and the WearUp glove for fine movements (small range movements such as finger kinematics). PD and neurotypical (NT) participants were recruited to perform 8 different movement tasks. The recorded data from each modality have been analyzed individually, and the processed data has been used for classification between the PD and NT groups. The average changes in oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO2) from fNIRS, EEG power spectral density in the Theta, Alpha, and Beta bands, acceleration vector from Mocap, and normalized WearUp flex sensor data were used for classification. 12 different support vector machine (SVM) classifiers have been used on different datasets such as only fNIRS data, only EEG data, hybrid fNIRS/EEG data, and all the fused data for two classification scenarios: classifying PD and NT based on individual activities, and all activity data fused together. The PD and NT group could be distinguished with more than 83% accuracy for each individual activity. For all the fused data, the PD and NT groups are classified with 81.23%, 92.79%, 92.27%, and 93.40% accuracy for the fNIRS only, EEG only, hybrid fNIRS/EEG, and all fused data, respectively. The results indicate that the overall performance of classification in distinguishing PD and NT groups improves when using both brain and body data. 
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  4. This research study investigates the impact of various insulating textile materials on the performance of smart textile pressure sensors made of conductive threads and piezo resistive material. We designed four sets of identical textile-based pressure sensors each of them integrating a different insulating textile substrate material. Each of these sensors underwent a series of tests that linearly increased and decreased a uniform pressure perpendicular to the surface of the sensors. The controlled change of the integration layer altered the characteristics of the pressure sensors including both the sensitivity and pressure ranges. Our experiments highlighted that the manufacturing design technique of textile material has a significant impact on the sensor; with evidence of reproducibility values directly relating to fabric dimensional stability and elasticity. 
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  5. Utilizing a consumer-grade smartwatch in conjunction with a prescribed exercise therapy plan can help to reduce the patient-level entry barriers into programs designed for patients with peripheral arterial disease, which affects millions of people worldwide. Currently, the alternative to this physical therapy plan is surgical therapy which costs between 3and5 billion annually. This paper presents the development and testing of WalkCoach app, a smart service system integrating a consumer-grade smartwatch (Polar M600) in the monitoring of supervised walking exercises. By monitoring a participant's baseline activity and improvements with time, it will be possible to provide personalized exercise prescriptions that can be easily modified or personalized to adjust and optimize for improved walking ability as the therapy progresses. This paper demonstrates the accuracy of the smartwatch-based WalkCoach app in a pilot cohort study of 10 healthy older adults (>65 yrs) who were recruited to perform a 400m overground walking task. Results are promising and show that the consumer-grade smartwatch accurately measures steps (step count = 637) compared to a video/manual step count (650 steps; Pearson's r = 0.96, P <;0.001). In the future, WalkCoach will be improved to produce granular analytics on a patient's compliance and performance to the supervised walking exercises. 
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  6. This work introduces Wearable deep learning (WearableDL) that is a unifying conceptual architecture inspired by the human nervous system, offering the convergence of deep learning (DL), Internet-of-things (IoT), and wearable technologies (WT) as follows: (1) the brain, the core of the central nervous system, represents deep learning for cloud computing and big data processing. (2) The spinal cord (a part of CNS connected to the brain) represents Internet-of-things for fog computing and big data flow/transfer. (3) Peripheral sensory and motor nerves (components of the peripheral nervous system (PNS)) represent wearable technologies as edge devices for big data collection. In recent times, wearable IoT devices have enabled the streaming of big data from smart wearables (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches, smart clothings, and personalized gadgets) to the cloud servers. Now, the ultimate challenges are (1) how to analyze the collected wearable big data without any background information and also without any labels representing the underlying activity; and (2) how to recognize the spatial/temporal patterns in this unstructured big data for helping end-users in decision making process, e.g., medical diagnosis, rehabilitation efficiency, and/or sports performance. Deep learning (DL) has recently gained popularity due to its ability to (1) scale to the big data size (scalability); (2) learn the feature engineering by itself (no manual feature extraction or hand-crafted features) in an end-to-end fashion; and (3) offer accuracy or precision in learning raw unlabeled/labeled (unsupervised/supervised) data. In order to understand the current state-of-the-art, we systematically reviewed over 100 similar and recently published scientific works on the development of DL approaches for wearable and person-centered technologies. The review supports and strengthens the proposed bioinspired architecture of WearableDL. This article eventually develops an outlook and provides insightful suggestions for WearableDL and its application in the field of big data analytics. 
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