Wrist Sensors –an Application to Acquire Sensory Data from Android Wear Smartwatches for Connected Health

Abstract

In our days where P4 (predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory) medicine is recognized as a promising sustainable solution to the problems of healthcare systems, there is an evident demand for individual-level biological, physical, behavioral or environmental data to support the development of efficient P4 medicine interventions. The self-acquisition of such data with the help of wearable sensor technology is the primary objective of the trending Quantified Self (QS) movement. Smart devices (smartphones, smartwatches, wrist sensors, etc.), with dozens of built-sensors and great adoption by the public, emerge as the perfect technology tools for satisfying the data acquisition pursuits of QS. In this effort, smartwatches demonstrate certain sensory advantages when compared to portable smart devices (e.g., smartphones). In this work we introduce Wrist Sensors, a novel Android Wear app for presenting the available sensors of compatible smartwatches and recording measurements from any user-specified subset of them. The recordings are persistently stored and made available in the communicating Android smartphone. The app, which has been made freely available via the Google Play distribution service, can serve as a valuable data acquisition tool to facilitate the development of efficient P4 medicine interventions. In fact, the app has already been used by a published study for acquiring the input dataset for developing a novel real-time bite detection algorithm.