Concepts

Levels of health monitoring

Preventive: Preventing people from having problems e.g. exercise, mental skills, turn of tv, social relations.

Predictive: Trying to guess if a person is going to be ill e.g. looking for changing behaviour or picking up signals from Bio Sensors

Assisting: Trying to help people in their everyday life e.g. hearing add, helping people remembering to take their pills.

Emergency: Technology that will help people in the case of an emergency e.g. fall sensors, alarm buttons

Privacy

An important aspect about sensing data about people’s private life is privacy. A lot of the critic about sensor networks has been about projects trying to change peoples home into a glass house visible to some foreign authority.

In this project we want to collect health data about a person in a private home health system. This system is by default a personal and closed system. The person using the system can grant other people or services access to part of the data collected by the Home Health System. E.g. the user of the system can grant an emergency service access to all cameras installed in the home and on the user in case a fall is detected with a fall sensor, or the user can allow a doctor to access a patient’s medical data during an online appointment.

By letting the user explicit decide who has access to the health data, what can of data they have access to and in what kind of circumstances we hope to be able to reduce privacy issues.

Sensors

The project relies on the existence of ubiquitous and reliable sensors that are able to collect information of the wellbeing of the users of the system. We are currently working on connecting a fall detection sensor to the system and connecting a set of Berkeley Motes to the mobile personal system and we are looking into attaching fixed cameras directly to the Home Health System. However, we hope that we are able to also connect other types of Bio-sensors to the system as they become available.

	Fall Sensor
	Bluetooth Module from BlueGiga
	Mobile personal device (Nokia 6680)

Gateways

In the project we have worked with two types of gateways:

A mobile gateway that is portable and which the sensors mounted on the user can use to send data to external systems and use to exchange data internally.

A fixed gateway used to connect sensors in the home to the Home Health System.

Sensor Fusion and network

With the use of the gateways we join the data from the different sensors. E.g. movement or fall detection sensors might be used to determine if access should be granted to other monitoring sensors like cameras or data from cameras, fall detection sensors and pulse sensors can be used jointly to establish a more precise diagnosis.