Wearable Computing

7Collaborative Body Sensor Networks

7.1 Introduction

The importance of wearable systems in facilitating and empowering many human‐centered domains has been already widely proved and discussed. However, despite their potential, the current BSN‐based systems are mostly used for applications focusing on the monitoring of a single individual. Also, the current BSN frameworks aim at providing effective programming supports for easily and efficiently developing applications for remote, real‐time monitoring of assisted livings over network based on a multisensors/single‐coordinator configuration. Since more and more applications in several domains (health care, entertainment, social interaction, sport, and emergency among others) demand different and more complex BSN‐based architectures, the paradigm centered on a single individual monitoring is not sufficient anymore to meet these new applications’ requirements.

Thus, the need for new multi‐BSN infrastructures, henceforth indicated as Collaborative Body Sensor Networks (CBSNs), is compelling to foster novel applications based on the collaborative approach of groups of individuals, where single BSNs have to cooperate with each other to properly monitor and recognize group activities in order to fulfill a common goal.

In this chapter, a reference architecture for CBSN applications, thus enabling interactions among single BSNs, is presented. Moreover, a new programming framework, Collaborative SPINE (C‐SPINE) [1,2], specifically designed to ...