Database Reference
In-Depth Information
There has been a fair amount of work on using smart environments
combined with body sensors for personal cardiac monitoring. This in-
cludes projects like Mobihealth [107] and PhMon [106]. Many of these
solutions collect the physiological signals, but ECG analysis is performed
remotely after transmission over a GPRS network. Recent work in mul-
tiple projects has enabled the processing of ECG data on a local device.
MOLEC [108] analyses the ECG locally on a PDA and generates alarms
to the hospital in case of high risk arrhythmias. The authors in [109] de-
velop an application whereby a heart patient is monitored using various
types of sensors (ECG, accelerometer, Oxygen), and analyzed locally on
a smart phone. The solution can be personalized by capturing location
context, and includes rehabilitation applications for individual patients.
In addition to smart environment and body sensors, there are also ef-
forts at building platforms for wellness management. One such platform
is Greenolive [110], an open scalable platform providing services that
are essential to wellness management. Greenolive includes open APIs
that allow new value-added applications to be developed rapidly. The
Greenolive platform consists of four components: Data Transformation
and Routing Services, Wellness Monitoring Services, Wellness Analytic
Services and Wellness Record and Knowledge Repository. With these
components, using a cloud based compute infrastructure, developers can
create different portals targeted towards both care assistants as well as
portals that connect with the sensors and provide end users wellness
services. More details on the platform and the included mining and
analytic capabilities are presented in [110].
4.2 Activity Monitoring
Several smart environments [96] have been built, deployed and tested
for pervasive healthcare applications focusing in activity monitoring.
These smart homes or oces include combinations of environmental
sensors, embedded in the home or the external environment, and body
sensors for improved monitoring of people with different conditions and
healthcare requirements.
One of the key roles of smart environments is to enable researchers to
monitor activities of daily living (ADL). In order to function indepen-
dently at home, individuals need to be able to complete several activities
of daily living such as eating, dressing, bathing, cooking, drinking, tak-
ing medicine etc. Automating the recognition of these activities is an
important step toward monitoring the functional health of a smart home
resident. In addition to the ADL, researchers are also very interested
in the interactions of users with the physical and social environment.
