Wearable and mobile sensing technologies are transforming healthcare by enabling continuous monitoring, real-time analytics, and personalized interventions. This narrative review explores recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI)–driven healthcare analytics, focusing on validation frameworks, drift detection, and generalization challenges associated with wearable sensing systems. Modern wearable devices equipped with biosensors capture physiological signals such as heart rate, activity, and stress indicators, while AI algorithms analyze multimodal data to generate actionable clinical insights. Ensuring reliability requires robust validation strategies that address sensor accuracy, data integrity, and clinical relevance in real-world settings. Drift detection methods help maintain model performance despite environmental changes and user variability. At the same time, generalization techniques support reliable deployment across diverse populations and clinical contexts, advancing scalable and adaptive digital healthcare systems.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a leading cause of death, with exacerbations worsening functional decline, reducing quality of life, and increasing healthcare use. Current management remains reactive, with treatment often initiated only after symptoms worsen. Existing monitoring approaches struggle to distinguish between clinically significant deterioration and normal variability, leading to delayed intervention. This article proposes a digital twin framework combining patient-specific respiratory models with real-time wearable data to predict and manage COPD exacerbations proactively. The framework includes a mechanistic lung model, continuous data ingestion, a data assimilation module, an exacerbation prediction layer, and an alert system, enabling early detection of physiological deviations before severe symptoms arise. By supporting pre-emptive telehealth, medication adjustments, and patient self-management with clinician oversight, this approach could shift COPD care from reactive to personalized, proactive management, pending robust modeling, reliable sensing, and real-world validation.
This systematic review examines the use of edge artificial intelligence (AI) and wearable sensors for real-time patient monitoring in smart hospitals and home settings, focusing on detecting deterioration, falls, arrhythmias, and infection-related changes. The review synthesizes studies from 2017 to 2026 on edge AI architectures, wearable sensor fusion, and clinical alert systems, emphasizing latency, power constraints, alert performance, and integration into clinical workflows. A PRISMA 2020-compliant search identified 127 studies from 2,100 records, with findings showing that while edge AI execution grew post-2020, it still represented a minority of designs. Sensor fusion was often linked to broader event coverage but increased implementation complexity. The review concludes that edge AI can reduce latency and enhance privacy but introduces challenges related to power usage, model complexity, device reliability, and maintenance, with limited clinical validation of alert systems and few studies addressing alert fatigue or clinician response.
Clinical Intelligence Research Press