Bridging eHealth and the Internet of Things: The SPHERE Project

There is a widely-accepted need to revise current forms of healthcare provision. Of particular interest are sensing systems in the home, which have been central to a number of studies in this area. This paper presents an overview of this rapidly growing body of work, as well the implications for machine learning, with a view to uncovering a gap between the state of the art and the broad needs of healthcare services in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). Most approaches address specific healthcare concerns, which typically results in solutions that are not able to support full-scale sensing and data analysis for a more generic healthcare service. The paper also outlines a multiple-modality sensor platform with heterogeneous network connectivity, which is under development in the Sensor Platform for HEalthcare in Residential Environment (SPHERE) Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC)