Smartphone-centric ambient assisted living platform for patients suffering from co-morbidities monitoring

Recently, patients suffering from a set of physical and mental limitations, called co-morbidities, are often treated at home. In this environment, modern communication systems represent a great support to implement Ambient Assisted Living platforms aimed at monitoring patients at home because they enable the seamless integration of heterogeneous sensing units, medical devices, and ubiquitous access to data. This article describes a specific smartphone-centric architecture where smartphones are employed not only as hubs of the health information but also as sensing, processing, and transmitting devices. Smartphones have both short-range (Bluetooth and WiFi employed for local information exchange) and long-range (GPRS, 3G/4G, and WiFi employed as Internet access) communication capabilities; information processing capabilities offered by modern platforms often equipped with different CPUs and with flexible and efficient software; and sensing capabilities implemented through sensors embedded into smartphones such as GPS receivers, accelerometers, microphones, and radio interfaces or through external sensors added to smartphones by cables or connected through local radio interfaces. The specific case of co-morbidities considered in this article implies the necessity to acquire a heterogeneous set of data from patients and from their environment. For this reason this article highlights the information processing capabilities of the introduced smartphone-centric platform. Audio, localization, and movement information processing have been evidenced as well as the specific implementations of these capabilities and their performance.