Personal gateway in mobile health monitoring

Recent technological advances in miniaturization of wireless portable bio-sensors and the versatility of smart phones have enabled the design and proliferation of continuous mobile health monitoring. A single smart phone is used as a gateway that interconnects sensors and remote servers in many health networking platforms. However, previous implementations lack a thorough assessment of the phone as they conduct evaluations with only the monitoring program running on it. In this paper, we examine the practicality of a smart phone through test-bed experiments in which the health monitoring software is running together with various smart phone applications. Based on the experiment results and observations, we conclude that a single smart phone is not adequate to satisfy full utilization of both the health monitoring service and the smart phone functionality. To ensure full utilization, we propose a PHM-Gate (Personal Health Monitoring Gateway). PHM-Gate is a special device that removes the restrictions caused by using a single gateway. A Bluetooth communication technique that enables PHM-Gate to successfully perform the monitoring tasks in collaboration with a smart phone is presented in this paper.