Wearable Computing

5Autonomic Body Sensor Networks

5.1 Introduction

High‐impact applications enabled by BSN‐based systems are required to be secure, safe, and reliable, especially when dealing with the monitoring and controlling of the physical and biochemical parameters of the human body. Achieving correctness, accuracy, and efficiency at execution time by meeting the strict requirements in terms of fault tolerance, adaptability, and reliability is of crucial importance and a very challenging issue. In this regard, the autonomic computing paradigm can perfectly fulfill such critical requirements of BSN applications in which proper techniques can be incorporated to enable specific self‐managing capabilities and successfully cope with unforeseen changing conditions that may lead to unpredictable behaviors.

This chapter first introduces background concepts on the autonomic paradigm and its application on the BSN context. Then, the needs for BSN‐specific autonomic‐enabling development tools are discussed. Finally, a framework conceived to support rapid design and implementation of applications having autonomic properties, SPINE‐*, is presented. Implemented as an extension of SPINE2, the autonomic elements are incorporated into the same high‐level abstractions adopted for developing the BSN applications. Specifically, it aims at easily integrating the autonomic behavior without affecting the applications, thanks to the adopted task‐oriented paradigm, which allows for the required separation of concerns ...