Explore the Ideal Human Body Part for Medical Wearable Sensors

Abstract

Wearing wearable devices has become a part of daily life for many people worldwide. Wearables provide various applications, including health monitoring, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. Since wearable devices are in close contact with the human body, considering human factors aspects during the design and development stages is essential for the success of future wearables. This research aims to assess the optimal body part for medical wearable sensors’ placement based on the wearable’s expert opinion questionnaire. The study focused on four main categories: cardiovascular monitoring, neuromuscular monitoring, biofluids, and gait disorders, considering three placement criteria: comfort, accuracy, and simplicity. Corresponding to the findings, there is a gap between the recent research outcomes and the experts’ answers. In particular, the answers to the questions related to the placements of wearable sensors for neurological and gait disorders were limited to the traditional clinical diagnosis techniques. This could be attributed to insufficient knowledge and collaboration between engineers and medical professionals. This highlights the need for a systematic way to evaluate the wearability of wearables based on their performance alongside wearability criteria by establishing a wearability assessment human-centric framework for each wearable sensor application supported by clinical studies and experimental data, which could reduce the time for development and commercialization of accurate, reliable, and comfortable wearable medical devices.

Received: 25 January 2025 | Revised: 17 July 2025 | Accepted: 28 July 2025

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data available on request from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Author Contribution Statement

Mohammad Y. Al-Daraghmeh: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft. Richard T. Stone: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Supervision. Fatima Z. Mgaedeh: Writing – Review & editing.