Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Mobile Computing
Joao M. G. Duarte , Eduardo Cerqueira and Leandro A. Villas
Institute
AbstractThe developments in wireless sensor networks, mobile technology and cloud computing have been pushing forward
the concept of intelligent or smart cities, and each day smarter
infrastructures are being developed with the aim of enhancing
the well-being of citizens. These advances in technology can
provide considerable benets for the diverse components of smart
cities including smart health which can be seen as the facet
of smart cities dedicated to healthcare. A considerable defy
that stills requiring appropriate responses is the development
of mechanisms to detect health issues in patients from the
very beginning. In this work, we propose a novel solution for
indoor patient monitoring for medical purposes. The output of
our solution will consist of a report containing the patterns
of room occupation by the patient inside her/his home during
a certain period of time. This report will allow health care
professionals to detect changes on the behavior of the patient
that can be interpreted as early signs of any health related
issue. The proposed solution was implemented in an Android
smartphone and tested in a real scenario. To assess our solution,
400 measurements divided into 10 experiments were performed,
reaching a total of 391 correct detections which corresponds to
an average effectiveness of 97.75%.
keywords: Indoor monitoring; Smart health; Wi-Fi; Mobile
computing; Smartphone; Behavior; Patient
I. I NTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the concept of Intelligent Cities is getting increased importance due to the benets that the projects related
to it can provide for the enhancement of the wellbeing of
citizens. Areas such as transportation, government, health,
education and so one are considered key elds where the
development of smart infrastructures can have a signicant
positive impact. Therefore, a considerable number of projects
related to these elds are being currently developed [1]. In
general, wireless sensor networks play an important role on the
implementation of projects for intelligent cities, in providing
the ability to sense the environment and collect information in
an effective and low cost way. Mobile technology on the other
hand, brings the advantage of ubiquity which enables users
to have permanent access to data and services that were not
reachable on the go in the recent past [2]. In the health sector,
the employment of wireless sensor networks presents numerous advantages. These advantages include data collection and
communication with minimal intervention of patients, the use
of small devices to collect data which increases patients
acceptance, reduction of the amount of visits that patients
are required to perform to medical centers, reduction in costs
when compared with existing wired alternatives and scalability
Wi-Fi signal strength based mechanism for monitoring the patterns of room occupation by patients inside their home using
smartphone. This approach presents as advantage the fact that
no extra infrastructure is required for its implementation since
existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and patients smartphones are to
be used.
The output of this application is a report containing the
dates and time when the patient entered each of the rooms of
his home or went outside. This report is intended to be used
by health specialists to track possible changes in the behavior
of the patient that can potentiate the immediate uncovering of
health issues. For example, a patient that is staying more time
than the usual in the bedroom or that is staying inside at the
time when she/he was used to go outside for a walk may have
started experiencing any health problem even though disease
symptoms are not yet being perceived.
The remaining of this work is organized in the following
manner. Section 2 presents an analysis of related works, section 3 presents a background overview, section 4 describes our
proposed solution section 5 presents a performance analysis of
our solution, section 6 presents an overview of the applicability
of this proposal and nally section 7 presents the concluding
remarks including some insights on future works that can be
performed to enhance this proposal.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Most of the research on Wi-Fi-based indoor localization has
shown its feasibility and proved its range of efciency [8].
In [9] the BeWell application for Android smartphones is
presented. This application uses an architecture based on the
interaction between cloud computing servers and smartphones
to track activities that impact physical, social, and mental wellbeing namely, sleep, physical activity, and social interactions
to provide feedback to users about their health state. In [10],
the WiMoCA, a wireless body area network that uses nodes
mounted on different parts of the human body is presented. Accelerometers which are nowadays standard sensors embedded
in mobile phones are used for monitoring human movement. In
[11] a Mobile Presence Control Information System model for
iOS and Android devices is presented. This model relies on the
geolocation capabilities of personal mobile devices and Mobile
Web technology to obtain location information of employees in
a business infrastructure. This work also proposes a technique
for determining the exactness of the received location data. In
[12] a multimodal system for seamless surveillance of elderly
people in their living environment is presented. The system
combines information from visual ow-based image analysis,
collected from premise-embedded sensors specic for each
environment and accelerometer-based information collected
from a wearable sensor network for each individual. This
system relies on a polar histogram-based method of visual
pose recognition and on an algorithm for danger detection.
The work proposed in [13] analyzes Wi-Fi signal intensities
from access points to determine whether or not it is possible
to locate and determine the orientation of old-aged people
in an elderly home, based on the use of these type of
Implementation():
path establishment for the output le
Wi- network authentication and connection
Timer conguration
Get Wi- Intensity
if roomChanged then
if intensity is in range 1 then
handle message 1
else
if intensity is in range 2 then
handle message 2
10
11
12
else
if intensity is in range 3 then
handle message 3
13
14
15
else
handle message 4
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Handler(message):
Get System Date and Time
Create the output le if necessary
switch message do
case 1
Open output le
Append Room ID
Append System Date and Time
Close the le
.
.
.
case 4
Open output le
Append Room ID
Append System Date and Time
Close the le
TABLE I
R ESULTS OF THE E XPERIMENTS
Total of Saples
400
VI. A PPLICABILITY
The output prole generated by the implementation of this
mechanism allows medical specialists to determine the amount
of time spent at each room by the patient and also to gure
out at what time the patient visited each room. Correlating
this data with more information provided by the patient about
the kind of activities that she/he is used to perform at each
room, the heath care professional in charge, can infer the
activities that were performed by the patient during the time
of monitoring. According to the activities that were performed
during each day by the patient, the health care professional
can therefore, conclude about changes in the behavior of the
patient inside home.
VII. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
In this paper we proposed, implemented and analyzed the
performance and applicability of a Wi-Fi based mechanism
for indoor monitoring of patients for medical purposes. This
mechanism relies on a real-time continuous sensing algorithm
that uses the ranges of Wi-Fi signal intensities to determine the
location of a patient inside its home at each moment. Based
on the values read, a prole of room occupation is then build
providing information about each time that the patient visited
each room of his/her house or went outside. The information in
the generated prole will allow medical specialists to monitor
the day to day of patients and detect changes on the behavior
of the patient that could be interpreted as early signs of any
disease. Such a mechanism is very welcome since it presents
a preventive way of health service provision and yet does
not require extra infrastructure. After performing several tests
at different times and with different durations at the selected
place, we concluded that this mechanism was able to detect the
changes of rooms by the patient and generating the intended
prole of room occupation.
As future work, we plan to extend this mechanism with
the employment of other types of sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscope and magnetometer in order to provide more
information such as the orientation of the patient inside a room
and activities being performed, besides also including building
plans to provide visual feedback of the location of the patient.
We are also planning the implementation of this mechanism
in other types of devices such as smartwatches to allow the
assessment of its feasibility in different kinds of devices.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank CAPES / CNPq Brazil for
the nancial support.
R EFERENCES