J Med Syst (2019) 43:50 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-019-1165-0 MOBILE & WIRELESS HEALTH A Survey of Healthcare Monitoring Systems for Chronically Ill Patients and Elderly Mamoun T. Mardini 1 · Youssef Iraqi 2 · Nazim Agoulmine 3 Received: 5 December 2017 / Accepted: 9 January 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The demand of healthcare systems for chronically ill patients and elderly has increased in the last few years. This demand is derived by the necessity to allow patients and elderly to be independent in their homes without the help of their relatives or caregivers. The prosperity of the information technology plays an essential role in healthcare by providing continuous monitoring and alerting mechanisms. In this paper, we survey the most recent applications in healthcare monitoring. We organize the applications into categories and present their common architecture. Moreover, we explain the standards used and challenges faced in this field. Finally, we make a comparison between the presented applications and discuss the possible future research paths. Keywords Pervasive healthcare · Elderly care · Healthcare monitoring · Wireless sensor network · Smart sensors Introduction The constant increase in elderly population caused by the innovations in healthcare and the decrease of birth rate is one of the major challenges currently facing the developing and developed countries. For example, in Japan nearly 20% of the population are aged 65 or older [1]. Figure 1 highlights the changing dynamics of elderly population distribution at various age groups in USA. This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile & Wireless Health This research was supported by the Khalifa University-Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Program.  Mamoun T. Mardini malmardini@ufl.edu Youssef Iraqi Youssef.Iraqi@ku.ac.ae Nazim Agoulmine Nazim.agoulmine@univ-evry.fr 1 Department of Aging and Geriatric Research, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL USA 2 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 3 University of ´ Evry Val d’Essonne, Paris Saclay University, ´ Evry, France The goal is to provide this population with healthcare systems that can be installed in their homes and turn them into smart homes [3]. These healthcare systems are able to gather data about the elderly and chronically ill persons, transfer and analyze them remotely. This can increase their ability to have a relaxed, independent and safe life in their homes; which can reduce the cost of staying at the hospitals. There are various existing systems that are developed for this purpose, which are summarized and presented in this paper. The remaining part of this paper is sec- tioned as follows: “Papers search and selection strategy” presents our strategy in selecting appropriate papers for this survey. Section “Healthcare initiatives” provides a list of the common healthcare initiatives in the healthcare sectors. Section “A summary of the surveyed applications” provides a summary of the surveyed applications. Sections “The com- mon healthcare architecture” and “Overview of pervasive healthcare systems” build upon the summary presented in “A summary of the surveyed applications” and preset the common architecture and the proposed categorization of the systems respectively. Some focused studies in healthcare sys- tems are introduced in “Focused studies in healthcare sys- tems”. Smart sensor concept and sensor standards are briefly explained in “Standards related to healthcare monitoring”. Section “Discussion and conclusion” provides a compre- hensive discussion explaining the major challenges faced in healthcare monitoring systems, a summary of the key points observed in surveyed systems, and a conclusion.