Recognizing Whether Sensors Are on the Same Body

As personal health sensors become ubiquitous, we also expect them to become interoperable. That is, instead of closed, end-to-end personal health sensing systems, we envision standardized sensors wirelessly communicating their data to a device many people already carry today, the cellphone. In an open personal health sensing system, users will be able to seamlessly pair off-the-shelf sensors with their cellphone and expect the system to just work. However, this ubiquity of sensors creates the potential for users to accidentally wear sensors that are not necessarily paired with their own cellphone. A husband, for example, might mistakenly wear a heart-rate sensor that is actually paired with his wife’s cellphone. As long as the heart-rate sensor is within communication range, the wife’s cellphone will be receiving heart-rate data about her husband, data that is incorrectly entered into her own health record. We provide a method to probabilistically detect this situation. Because acc...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: PERVASIVE
• Authors: Cory Cornelius, David Kotz
• Keywords: Accelerometers, Applied Computing, Communication Range, PERVASIVE 2011, Rate Sensor