SenseFace: A sensor network overlay for social networks

Sensor devices can capture and process physical phenomena and transmit sensory data to remote locations without any human intervention. One noticeable multidisciplinary advancement in recent sensor technology has resulted in wearable sensor devices that can monitor different daily activities of a human body by forming a body sensor network (BSN). Based on the event, the captured physical data might be very important and must reach interested entities or individuals, if deemed necessary. This requires a framework to deliver the captured sensory data to one´s community of interest (COI), which can also be regarded as one´s social network. The social network encompasses one´s family members, friends, colleagues at work or business, government, and all those that a person communicates with for either a short or long period of time. In this paper, we propose a framework that creates an overlay network to create a secure communication passage for dynamic sensory data communication among users belonging to the same COI. We consider a real life scenario of a 4-tier network consisting of a BSN, cellular network, Intenet and overlay network to deliver sensory data from the BSN to the overlay network. We then introduce our initial open source service oriented prototype of the framework, called SenseFace. SenseFace is suitable for capturing the sensory data from a user´s BSN, processing and storing the sensory data in his/her personal gateway, which is a mobile device, sending the data to a remote Internet gateway and finally disseminating the sensory data intelligently to a list of his/her social networks. Finally, we share the experiences we have gathered after the initial phase of the implementation.