[2]. Thus, it is predestinated to serve as the patient’s terminal
device hosting an application to communicate with a remote
telemonitoring service.
The hosted application manages data acquisition by interrogating
sensor devices, processes and synchronizes those data,
and receives and visualizes motivational and therapeutic feedback
information [3].
Over the last decades, mobile network technologies advanced
from Global System for Mobile communications to 4G networks
like long-term evolution and worldwide interoperability for microwave
access [4]. This evolution solved the problems regarding
the connection to the telemonitoring center by providing
high bandwidth and the possibility of being all-time online [1].
But the interplay between the mobile phone acting as an application
hosting device (AHD) and medical sensor devices still
remains an open issue. The majority of mobile phones on the
market today are sophisticated devices with relatively complicated
user interfaces. Mastery of their functions can sometimes
take a long time [5].
B. Personal/Body Area Networks
By means of wireless PAN and body area network (BAN),
the mobile phone serves as the hub of a set of portable or
wearable sensors that monitor health-related parameters such
as blood pressure, body weight, glucose, oxygen saturation, or
even ECG signals [6]–[8].
1) Bluetooth: Bluetooth is the most popular PAN technology
available in mobile phones. It is an industry standard for the
wireless connection of portable devices and offers an operating
range of up to 100 m at a theoretical data rate of up to 24 Mb/s
(version 3.0 + HS) [9]. Bluetooth is an established and acknowledged
technology in the medical environment [10] and has been
selected by the Continua Health Alliance as PAN/BAN interface
between the AHD and sensor devices [11]. For this purpose, the
Bluetooth special interest group specified the Bluetooth health
device profile (HDP) [12] and presented Bluetooth low energy
(LE) as a feature of Bluetooth v4.0 [13] to provide fast system
setup and LE communication for vital monitoring applications.
But so far, handling Bluetooth-enabled devices and making
them communicate is not intuitive due to the setup procedure.
Using mobile phones, this procedure includes several manual
steps to perform the device/service discovery and pairing
process [14]. Handling this complex configuration procedure
(device/service discovery and pairing) may overstrain especially
elderly patients [15].