A framework for harmonizing sensor data to support embedded health assessment

The use of in-home and mobile sensing is likely to be a key component of future care and has recently been studied by many research groups world-wide. Researchers have shown that embedded sensors can be used for health assessment such as early illness detection and the management of chronic health conditions. However, research collaboration and data sharing have been hampered by disparate sets of sensors and data collection methods. To date, there have been no studies to investigate common measures that can be used across multiple sites with different types of sensors, which would facilitate large scale studies and reuse of existing datasets. In this paper, we propose a framework for harmonizing heterogeneous sensor data through an intermediate layer, the Conceptual Sensor, which maps physical measures to clinical space. Examples are included for sleep quality and ambulatory physical function.