Health sensing by wearable sensors and mobile phones: A survey

Abstract

With the global trend of population aging in industrialized countries, efficient information and communication technologies (ICT) for aiding elders or patients' healthcare have attracted great research attentions. Among these technologies, health state sensing by wearable sensors and mobile phones is an important foundation. It monitors the real-time body states; stores, or sends the result to remote family members or doctors. In this way, it can either help people to pay more attention to the overlooked phenomenon, such as the clue of dangerous disease, or help people to issue panic alert when emergency happens. There are many critical issues in health sensing. First, the sensors must be non-intrusive to people's comfort and safety, while providing good accuracy. At the same time, because of being worn by people, numerous noises posed by body motions must be efficiently processed for reducing false alarming. At last, different health or decease signals generally require different sensing technologies and instrument. To tease out the technology advantages that address these challenges and diversities, this paper presented a survey on the state of the art of health sensing technologies using body sensor networks and mobile phones. It classify related works by their application goals, including i) fall detection, ii) gait analyzing, iii) activity qualification, iv) heart state sensing, and v) sleep sensing. It also conducts summary and comparison of related sensing systems and algorithms, to reveal the development lines in each subarea.