Abstract |
Modern smartphones are a rich and pervasive source of information about the environment. Being equipped with position sensors, movement sensors, barometers, thermometers, etc., they can feed smart applications with a huge amount of data about themselves and the surroundings. Moreover, they can collect data from various kinds of interconnected wearable devices. However, it is hard to exit from a purely local view of the smartphone capabilities and to be able to treat all those information sources as components of a scalable platform, enabling the rapid and effective development of applications in fields such as e-health, smart environments, and smart city. We have designed an architecture, namely, Wearable environment acquisition and representation infrastructure, which allows seeing each sensor as a source of information, which can be dynamically tied to a distributed application. This is made possible by an App, hosted by each smartphone, which can be interrogated about the device capabilities. The concept is demonstrated by the development of an e-health application supporting personalized recovery/training programs. The advantages of this solution for the production process of Internet of Things software consist in a faster application development and in the resulting code being more robust and easily portable. The App can also provide information about the willingness of the owner to contribute a certain amount of data by periodically publishing sensor measurements. In this way, it will be possible to configure smart city applications on the fly, providing, for instance, traffic density information or road bump recognition or noise pollution indications. |