Creating smarter spaces to unleash the potential of health apps

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. Technologies necessary for the development of pervasive health apps with intensive and seamless interactions with their environments are now widely available. Research studies and experimentations have demonstrated the real ability for health apps to interact with their environment. However, designing, testing and ensuring the maintenance and evolution of pervasive health apps remains very complex. In particular, there is a lack of tools to enable developers to design apps that can adapt to increasingly complex and changing environments (sensors added or removed, failures, mobility etc.). This paper reflects our vision to reduce this complexity and is based on our current research work on smart environment and personalized health monitoring apps. It uses SAM, a smart asthma monitoring app as an illustration to highlight the need for a comprehensive set of new interactions to help health app developers interact with the users’ environment, and more specifically get a smarter access to the data. Some requirements can be on the minimum quality level of the data and the way to adapt to the diversity of the sources (data fusion/aggregation), on the network mechanisms used to collect the data (network/link level) and on the collection of the raw data (sensors). It discusses possible solutions to address these needs