Smartphone-centric human posture monitoring system

Abstract

The popularity of smartphones around the world has the potential to dramatically improve healthcare, due to the high portability, computing capability, and ease of usage. Today's smartphones are easily programmable and come with a growing set of powerful embedded sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, microphones, and cameras. Indeed, the smartphones equipped with such miniaturized sensors will potentially reshape the future of healthcare by facilitating proactive personal wellbeing management and ubiquitous health monitoring including physiological signs and human posture observation. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a smartphone-centric software for monitoring the human posture by using the acceleration sensors which are embedded in smartphones. Additionally, an emphasis is given to interpreting the obtained data from the acceleration sensors to achieve context-awareness suitable for healthcare applications. Such the smartphone-centric monitoring softwares are also more cost-effective and less complex compared to its conventional counterparts where multiple wearable sensors are incorporated.