Wearable Computing

9Integration of Wearable and Cloud Computing

9.1 Introduction

As widely discussed so far, wearable sensors and BSNs provide a platform for many human‐centered applications, ranging from health care to gaming, sports performance analysis, and social networking. There is currently an enormous public interest in biomedical sensor‐based systems and wearable consumer electronics that allow individuals, ranging from children to elders, to monitor their health and control their fitness. In all BSN scenarios, assisted livings are monitored by BSNs to gather data streams for processing them in real time [1] and archiving them in remote data repositories for off‐line analysis. Such scenarios imply that a huge amount of data could be transmitted, stored, and analyzed. Thus, such huge amount of data generated by BSNs requires a powerful and scalable processing and storage platform that is able to support both online and off‐line analysis of sensor data streams. This chapter therefore provides a research‐oriented perspective on the integration of wearable and cloud computing to fulfill the aforementioned requirement. After providing some basic elements on cloud computing and introducing the motivations and the challenges of integrating wearable computing and cloud computing, the chapter focuses on the virtualization of body sensor networks (BSNs) through a reference cloud‐based architecture. We will then discuss and compare the state‐of‐the‐art about WSN and BSN virtualization with respect to ...