PhysioDroid: Combining Wearable Health Sensors and Mobile Devices for a Ubiquitous, Continuous, and Personal Monitoring

Technological advances on the development of mobile devices, medical sensors, and wireless communication systems support a new generation of unobtrusive, portable, and ubiquitous health monitoring systems for continuous patient assessment and more personalized health care. There exist a growing number of mobile apps in the health domain; however, little contribution has been specifically provided, so far, to operate this kind of apps with wearable physiological sensors. The PhysioDroid, presented in this paper, provides a personalized means to remotely monitor and evaluate users’ conditions. The PhysioDroid system provides ubiquitous and continuous vital signs analysis, such as electrocardiogram, heart rate, respiration rate, skin temperature, and body motion, intended to help empower patients and improve clinical understanding. The PhysioDroid is composed of a wearable monitoring device and an Android app providing gathering, storage, and processing features for the physiological sensor data. The versatility of the developed app allows its use for both average users and specialists, and the reduced cost of the PhysioDroid puts it at the reach of most people. Two exemplary use cases for health assessment and sports training are presented to illustrate the capabilities of the PhysioDroid. Next technical steps include generalization to other mobile platforms and health monitoring devices.This work was partially supported by the Spanish CICYT Project SAF2010-20558, Junta de Andalucia Project P09-TIC-175476, and the FPU Spanish Grant AP2009-2244. This work was also supported in part by the INTERREG IV European Project WHM-Wireless Health Monitoring (I-1-02=091) and the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme FP7 Project OPENi-Open-Source, Web-Based, Framework for Integrating Applications with Social Media Services, and Personal Cloudlets under Grant no. 317883