Bridging e-Health and the Internet of Things: The SPHERE Project

TLDR

Healthcare provision requires revision, with home‑sensing systems emerging as a central focus in recent studies. The article reviews emerging home‑sensing research and aims to identify gaps between current machine‑learning advances and the broader needs of ambient assisted living services. The authors propose a multimodal sensor platform with heterogeneous connectivity that seamlessly links data‑collection infrastructure and analytics to support generic ambient assisted living services, and outline its development within the SPHERE IRC.

Abstract

There's a widely known need to revise current forms of healthcare provision. Of particular interest are sensing systems in the home, which have been central to several studies. This article presents an overview of this rapidly growing body of work, as well as the implications for machine learning, with an aim of uncovering the gap between the state of the art and the broad needs of healthcare services in ambient assisted living. Most approaches address specific healthcare concerns, which typically result in solutions that aren't able to support full-scale sensing and data analysis for a more generic healthcare service, but the approach in this article differs from seamlessly linking multimodel data-collecting infrastructure and data analytics together in an AAL platform. This article also outlines a multimodality sensor platform with heterogeneous network connectivity, which is under development in the sensor platform for healthcare in a residential environment (SPHERE) Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC).