A review between consumer and medical-grade biofeedback devices for quality of life studies

Abstract

With the rise in wearable technology and “health culture”, we are seeing a rising interest and affordances in studying how to not only prolong life expectancy but also in how to improve individuals’ quality of life. On one hand, this attempts to give meaning to the increasing life expectancy, as living above a certain threshold of pain and lack of autonomy or mobility is both degrading and unfair. On the other hand, it lowers the cost of continuous care, as individuals with high quality of life indexes tend to have lower hospital readmissions or secondary complications, not to mention higher physical and mental health. In this paper, we evaluate the current state of the art in physiological therapy (biofeedback) along with the existing medical grade and consumer grade hardware for physiological research. We provide a comparative analysis between these two device grades and also discuss the finer details of each consumer grade device in terms of functionality and adaptability for controlled (laboratory) and uncontrolled (field) studies.