Challenges of leveraging mobile sensing devices in wireless healthcare

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging type of networks formed by a set of distributed sensor nodes that collaborate to monitor environmental and physical conditions. Mobile medical sensor devices are rapidly emerging as one promising way to monitor patient health and the quality of patient care while improving convenience to the patient and reducing the cost of care by allowing patients to spend more time out of the hospital. In the future, mobile sensors could keep track of everyday behaviors that are reflective of physical and physiological health states and predictive of future health problems. We expect that wearable, portable, and even embeddable sensors will overcome some of the challenges of existing approaches and enable long-term continuous medical monitoring for many purposes. Examples include: Outpatients with chronic medical conditions (such as diabetes); individuals seeking to change behavior (such as losing weight); physicians needing to quantify and detect behavioral aberrations for early diagnosis (such as depression); or athletes wishing to monitor their condition and performance. In this paper, we focus on adapting smartphones used by individuals for health monitoring and present a case study on the design and implementation of a context-aware wireless healthcare application that leverages the capabilities of phone sensor subsystem in tracking human health conditions. The application´s detailed scenario and enhanced Android architecture for this solution is presented.