Chapter 4
Monitoring Well Being
The term quality of life is used to evaluate the general well being of individuals and societies. It is used in a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare and politics. Quality of life should not be confused with the concept of standard of living. Standard indicators of the quality of life not only include wealth and employment, but also the built environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, and social belonging. The monitoring of any aspects of being well is critical for any government in order to get feedback about the society. This reason emphasised the necessity of providing efficient developments and systems which can provide tools for measuring such quality of life. This chapter is focused on monitoring being well from the point of view of health monitoring.
Thus, this chapter is structured as follows: Section 4.1 describes different sensing platforms for measuring health by means of vital constants. After that, Section 4.2 is focused on the monitoring of chronic diseases, since these kind of monitoring systems entail particular requirements in the design of the sensing systems. Sections 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 describe particular use cases directly related to the well-being monitoring in which the reader is able to get real application scenarios in which distributed sensing platforms are being used for such a purpose. In particular, the use case described in Section ...
