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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged as a pandemic with serious clinical manifestations including death. A pandemic at the large-scale like COVID-19 places extraordinary demands on the world's health systems, dramatically devastates vulnerable populations, and critically threatens the global communities in an unprecedented way. While tremendous efforts at the frontline are placed on detecting the virus, providing treatments and developing vaccines, it is also critically important to examine the technologies and systems for tackling disease emergence, arresting its spread and especially the strategy for diseases prevention. The objective of this article is to review enabling technologies and systems with various application scenarios for handling the COVID-19 crisis. The article will focus specifically on 1) wearable devices suitable for monitoring the populations at risk and those in quarantine, both for evaluating the health status of caregivers and management personnel, and for facilitating triage processes for admission to hospitals; 2) unobtrusive sensing systems for detecting the disease and for monitoring patients with relatively mild symptoms whose clinical situation could suddenly worsen in improvised hospitals; and 3) telehealth technologies for the remote monitoring and diagnosis of COVID-19 and related diseases. Finally, further challenges and opportunities for future directions of development are highlighted.

Industry 4.0 is spilling out from manufacturing to healthcare. In this article, we provide a brief history and key enabling technologies of Industry 4.0, and its revolution in healthcare—Healthcare 4.0—and its reshaping of the landscape of the entire healthcare value chain. We discuss the shift in the system design paradigm from open, small, and single loop to closed, large, and multiple loops. We provide the example of a Caregiving Home, and discuss emerging research topics and challenges, including healthcare big data, automated medical production, healthcare robotics, and human–robot symbiosis. Relevant papers published in this special section are also presented.

The steady increases in cardiovascular disease (CVD) and the continuing spread of coronavirus disease (COVID- 19) remain unprecedented public health crises of international concerns. The multiple crises are causing catastrophic human losses and tremendous health and economic burdens worldwide. This issue explores the CVD crisis in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. The success of fighting against both deadly diseases will only come from a paradigm shift transforming the current reactive medicine focusing on the last stage of treatment to proactive health focusing on the early prediction, early diagnosis and prevention of diseases. Reports on the emerging field of health engineering, an emerging interdisciplinary field for the implementation of proactive health.

Discusses the benefits of mobile health(mHealth) technologies. These technologies empower patients to be more involved in their own care, give healthcare consumers greater access to providers, and vice versa, and allow for better personalized, precise, pervasive, and preventive medicine, in more effective and less costlyways.At the cutting edge of health engineering, the field of emerging mHealth promises a new era of highly individualized treatment of disease and preventive medicine, bringing the health convergence to reality.

Driven by the growing aging population, prevalence of chronic diseases, and continuously rising healthcare costs, the healthcare system is undergoing a fundamental transformation, from the conventional hospital-centered system to an individual-centered system. Current and emerging developments in wearable medical systems will have a radical impact on this paradigm shift. Advances in wearable medical systems will enable the accessibility and affordability of healthcare, so that physiological conditions can be monitored not only at sporadic snapshots but also continuously for extended periods of time, making early disease detection and timely response to health threats possible. This paper reviews recent developments in the area of wearable medical systems for p-Health. Enabling technologies for continuous and noninvasive measurements of vital signs and biochemical variables, advances in intelligent biomedical clothing and body area networks, approaches for motion artifact reduction, strategies for wearable energy harvesting, and the establishment of standard protocols for the evaluation of wearable medical devices are presented in this paper with examples of clinical applications of these technologies.

Analog integrated circuits (ICs) designed for processing physiological signals are important building blocks of wearable and implantable medical devices used for health monitoring or restoring lost body functions. Due to the nature of physiological signals and the corresponding application scenarios, the ICs designed for these applications should have low power consumption, low cutoff frequency, and low input-referred noise. In this paper, techniques for designing the analog front-end circuits with these three characteristics will be reviewed, including subthreshold circuits, bulk-driven MOSFETs, floating gate MOSFETs, and log-domain circuits to reduce power consumption; methods for designing fully integrated low cutoff frequency circuits; as well as chopper stabilization (CHS) and other techniques that can be used to achieve a high signal-to-noise performance. Novel applications using these techniques will also be discussed.