Introductory Chapter: Data Acquisition

*Bartłomiej Płaczek*

### **1. Introduction**

New biomedical technologies can support faster development of disease treatments, prevention, and diagnostic procedures. They are expected to make significant contributions to the quality of life, improve patient healthcare, and reduce the related costs. Advancement of data acquisition techniques is a key prerequisite for the development in biomedical engineering. Recent advances in data acquisition systems, sensor design, and sensor networks allow collection of large volumes of detailed biomedical data. For instance, body area networks with wireless sensors can be used to non-invasively and continuously monitor several physiological parameters and recognize human activities [1]. Other examples are visual sensor networks for supervision of patients during rehabilitation and Internet of Things (IoT) systems with medical devices connected to the internet that can collect valuable data, enable detailed analysis of symptoms and facilitate remote healthcare. Valuable biomedical data can be also acquired using image processing methods for micrographs analysis [2]. This book intends to provide the reader with an insight into the current state-of-the-art in biomedical data acquisition and focuses on the most important developments in this highly important area.

Few examples of the aforementioned data acquisition techniques are discussed in the introductory chapter. In particular, this chapter concisely reviews the selected approaches that utilize network-connected sensors.
