Medical Virtual Instrumentation for Personalized Health Monitoring: A Systematic Review.

The rising cost of healthcare and the increased senior population are some reasons for the growing adoption of the Personalized Health Monitoring (PHM) systems. Medical Virtual Instruments (MVIs) provide portable, flexible, and low-cost options for these systems. Our systematic literature search covered the Cochrane Library, Web of Science, and MEDLINE databases, resulting in 915 articles, and 25 of which were selected for inclusion after a detailed screening process that involved five stages. The review sought to understand the key aspects regarding the use of MVIs for PHM, and we identified the main disease domains, sensors, platforms, algorithms, and communication protocols for such systems. We also identified the key challenges affecting the level of integration of MVIs into the global healthcare framework. The review shows that MVIs provide a good opportunity for the development of low cost personalized health systems that meet the unique instrumentation requirements for a given medical domain.