A low-cost wireless body area network for human activity recognition in healthy life and medical applications

Moved by the necessity, also related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, of the design of innovative solutions in the context of digital health, and digital medicine, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are more and more emerging as a central system for the implementation of solutions for well-being and healthcare. In fact, by elaborating the data collected by a WBAN, advanced classification models can accurately extract health-related parameters, thus allowing, as examples, the implementations of applications for fitness tracking, monitoring of vital signs, diagnosis, and analysis of the evolution of diseases, and, in general, monitoring of human activities and behaviours. Unfortunately, commercially available WBANs present some technological and economic drawbacks from the point of view, respectively, of data fusion and labelling, and cost of the adopted devices. To overcome existing issues, in this paper, we present the architecture of a low-cost WBAN, which is built upon accessible off-the-shelf wearable devices and an Android application. Then, we report its technical evaluation concerning resource consumption. Finally, we demonstrate its versatility and accuracy in both medical and well-being application scenarios.