Design and Implementation of a Platform for Wearable/Mobile Smart Environments

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 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 WEAR-IT, 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 the production process of IoT 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.