Mobile Phone Sensing System for Health Monitoring

One of the most important device in our lives is a mobile phone. For now, it is a powerful computing platform equipped with various sensors. Embedded sensors can be used in multiple domains, such as environmental monitoring, social networks, safety and also healthcare. Sensor enabled mobile phones or smart phones are hovering to be at the center of a next revolution in social networks, green applications, global environmental monitoring, personal and community healthcare, sensor augmented gaming, virtual reality and smart transportation systems. Health monitoring is repeatedly mentioned as one of the main application areas for Pervasive computing. Mobile Health Care is the integration of mobile computing and health monitoring. It is the application of mobile computing technologies for improving communication among patients, physicians, and other health care workers. As mobile devices have become an inseparable part of our life it can integrate health care more seamlessly to our everyday life. In this paper we survey the main use cases of mobile phone sensors in mobile healthcare. We classify the proposed mHealth sensing applications according to sensor types they use and discuss the main advantages provided by these applications.