Sensing Platforms for Prototyping and Experimenting Wearable Continuous Health Monitoring Systems

Abstract

Continuous monitoring generally imposes a set of constraints including form factor, energy consumption, and mobility support in order to enable anywhere and anytime monitoring. Sensors, within this context, play an important role as the first building block of such systems and the main entry point for the monitoring process. Therefore, to experiment continuous health-monitoring systems in real-like conditions, sensing platforms need to meet a number of related requirements and constraints, especially for mobility factor. This chapter aims to present an overview of popular sensing platforms meeting appropriate constraints, allowing experimenters and researchers to start prototyping and experimentation projects for continuous health monitoring. For that, a number of requirements and constraints for continuous monitoring prototyping are firstly identified, then sensing platforms are classified into three proposed and compared categories, namely, ready-to-use, ready-to-compose kits, and do-it-yourself platforms. On that basis, a set of interesting platforms are reviewed and compared under each category.