Wireless Programmable Body Sensor Networks and Situated Healthcare

Abstract

Wireless Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) represent an interesting challenge to effectively control dangerous pathology and to monitor the well being status of elderly and fragile people. However, such networks don’t take into account the context that highly influences the health status. This counteracts with the notion of situated healthcare more and more claimed from both sociological and medical point of view to provide effective healthcare interventions. Following this point of view, the paper illustrates an effective architecture to control health status taking into account the user context. In particular, programmable wireless body sensor networks recently available on the market fused with environmental portable sensors are evaluated to provide a viable step towards a smart situated healthcare, i.e., monitoring and control from remote sites and in real time people in their context by using IoT devices provided with artificial intelligence, i.e., AIoT devices, and suitable web services that allow such smart bodily networks to interact with networks of other people, doctors or hospitals. Current limits and potentialities are pointed out by a case study.