An Extensible Healthcare Context Engine Based on Smart Phones

Population aging problem has become a severe challenge worldwide and will become even severer in the near future. Meanwhile the technology of smart phones and various sensors is developing by leaps and bounds in the last few years. In order to help people who have difficulty in living independently, especially the senior citizens and facilitate efficient use of these sensors, it is worthwhile to explore the possibility of making use of smart phones to manage these sensors and provide valuable information. In this paper, a context engine run on the Android platform is introduced. The context engine targets healthcare usage, collecting healthcare related information from three kinds of sensors: ambient sensors, wearable sensors, and embedded sensors, with the attention of providing real time reminders, sharing information to other applications and recording the user's daily life. Experiment result shows that average accuracy of reminders can reach 82% in user’s daily life within the context engine. The results are expected to be improved with more sensors and more accurate sensors involved in the system. Compared to other similar work, this context engine focuses on the mobile platform that can cover most of user’s time in daily time while maintaining portability.