Server-assisted context-dependent pervasive wellness monitoring

Abstract

Recent research on remote health monitoring solutions has focused largely on developing context-dependent, streamprocessing capabilities on a personal mobile hub (typically, a cellphone) for energy-efficient transmission of data collected from a set of body-worn medical sensors. In this paper, we argue that commercial deployment of such pervasive wellness monitoring will require the extension of such ‘context dependency’ to the process of data collection (from the sensors to the mobile device) as well. In particular, the utilization of an individuals non-medical activity context, by the cellphone, in coordination with a backend server, is posited to be the key to supporting important objectives such as intermittent sensing and data security/privacy. The server-side platform is able to extract relevant context from a wide variety of personal or generic backend information streams; this context is then enriched by local context derived by the smartphone. We present an early outline of a middleware platform for supporting this objective.