Wearable Computing

11SPINE‐Based Body Sensor Network Applications

11.1 Introduction

The worldwide trend of increasing average life expectancy and a more profound awareness of the importance of taking actions at different levels to keep a good health status are forcing the health system to significant renovation. Enabling technologies in this context are the current powerful personal mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, the body sensor networks (BSNs), i.e. wearable sensor units (smart watches, glasses, and wristbands) that are often able to monitor several health parameters, and the cloud computing infrastructures. The result is a great opportunity of providing very diverse and personalized smart‐Health services that could be accessible to anyone, anywhere, and anytime.

11.2 Background

This chapter emphasizes how the SPINE framework is actually able to support the development of heterogeneous health‐care applications based on reusable subsystems. Indeed, one of the main goal of SPINE (see Chapter 3) is to provide a flexible architecture that can support a variety of practical applications without the need for costly redeployment of the code running on sensor nodes. This chapter therefore introduces some interesting research BSN systems that have been developed atop SPINE. Furthermore, each of the described applications improved the current state‐of‐the‐art, as described in the following sections.

11.3 Physical Activity Recognition

Physical activities play a fundamental role in human well‐being; ...