BodyCloud: A SaaS approach for community Body Sensor Networks

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) have been recently introduced for the remote monitoring of human activities in a broad range of application domains, such as health care, emergency management, fitness and behavior surveillance. BSNs can be deployed in a community of people and can generate large amounts of contextual data that require a scalable approach for storage, processing and analysis. Cloud computing can provide a flexible storage and processing infrastructure to perform both online and offline analysis of data streams generated in BSNs. This paper proposes BodyCloud, a SaaS approach for community BSNs that supports the development and deployment of Cloud-assisted BSN applications. BodyCloud is a multi-tier application-level architecture that integrates a Cloud computing platform and BSN data streams middleware. BodyCloud provides programming abstractions that allow the rapid development of community BSN applications. This work describes the general architecture of the proposed approach and presents a case study for the real-time monitoring and analysis of cardiac data streams of many individuals. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.