To evaluate the application status of wearable smart devices in domestic and foreign medical fields through visual analysis.

With “smart wearable device” “wearable smart device” “Smart wearable device” and “wearable smart devices” as search terms, literatures on the application status of wearable intelligent devices in the medical field at home and abroad in the core collection of CNKI, Wanfang, VIP, PubMed and Web of Science databases were retrieved from the establishment of the databases to April 30, 2023. The software CiteSpace was used for bibliometric analysis, including publication trend, institutional cooperation network, publication journal distribution analysis, keyword co-occurrence, clustering and emergence analysis, as well as publication journal and literature co-citation analysis.

A total of 121 valid Chinese literatures and 289 English literatures were obtained. Domestic and foreign research began in 2013 and 2004, respectively, and the overall number of published papers showed an upward trend. The top 3 institutions of publication in China were Chinese Academy of Sciences (13 articles), Union Hospital Affiliated to Huazhong University of Science and Technology (11 articles), and West China Nursing College of Sichuan University (10 articles). The top 3 institutions in the number of foreign publications were Harvard University (13 articles), the University of California (14 articles), and the University of London (5 articles). The top 3 Chinese journals in terms of publication volume were Nursing Research, Journal of Nursing Science and Chinese Journal of Nursing, with 38 publications, accounted for 31.4% of the total publications. The top 3 foreign journals in terms of publication volume are Sensors, IEEE Access and Applied Sciences-Basel, with a total of 39 publications, accounted for 13.5% of the total publications. A total of 8 Chinese keyword clusters and 10 English keyword clusters were formed. The top 5 categories were “senior citizens” “artificial intelligence” “mobile medical” “extended care” “nursing” and “wearable electronics” “sensor” “deep learning” “mobile health” and “big data”; there were 9 emergent words in Chinese and 10 emergent words in English. The top 5 were “wearable” “internet of things” “review literature” “big data” “smart watch” and “care” “activity recognition” “wearable sensors” “system” and “accelerometer”. The journal with the highest total citation frequency was Sensors, and the journal with the highest total citation center was Biosens. Bioelectron.. There were 2 literatures with a total citation frequency of 11-20 times, and 10 literatures with a frequency of 5-10 times.

The research popularity of wearable smart devices in the medical field is generally increasing, and the quantity and quality of English papers are higher than those of Chinese. At present, mobile health is mainly used in the fields of physical signs monitoring, pain assessment, rehabilitation and exercise. Mobile health is a common research hotspot at home and abroad.

Medicine; Smart wearable device; Application status; Visualization analysis