Human Health Engineering

Book excerpt: In this Special Issue on human health engineering, we invited submissions exploring recent contributions to the field of human health engineering, which is the technology used for monitoring the physical or mental health status of individuals in a variety of applications. Contributions focused on sensors, wearable hardware, algorithms, or integrated monitoring systems. We organized the different papers according to their contributions to the main aspects of the monitoring and control engineering scheme applied to human health applications, including papers focusing on measuring/sensing physiological variables, contributions describing research on the modelling of biological signals, papers highlighting health monitoring applications, and finally examples of control applications for human health. In comparison to biomedical engineering, the field of human health engineering also covers applications on healthy humans (e.g., sports, sleep, and stress) and thus not only contributes to develop technology for curing patients or supporting chronically ill people, but also more generally for disease prevention and optimizing human well-being.