our health and fitness decisions, redefining the doctor-patient
relationship and reducing healthcare cost. Looking at the
bigger picture, Futuresource research [17] points out that the
wearable electronics technologies will undoubtedly continue
to expand in consumer sectors, and also acceptance will
continue in other sectors, in particular healthcare sectors, and
the market growth at a value of over $20 billion by 2017.
The activity monitoring of humans is a very active area
of research and a lot of activities are going on. There
are many parts which are to be considered in a global
way: (1) types of sensors to be used; (2) type of wireless
protocols to be employed; (3) monitoring of activities to
be considered; (4) methodology to determine activities or
extraction of important features; (5) design and development
of small, light-weight, powerful and low-cost smart sensor
nodes; (6) harvesting of energy for normal operation and
communication; (7) ability to be used with the present day
mobile devices; (8) flexible to configure the system for a new
user without much difficulty.
II. ARCHITECTURE OF THE HUMAN ACTIVITY
The basic architecture of the human activity monitoring
system can be represented with the help of a block diagram;
the simplest one is shown in Figure 1. Depending on the task
of monitoring, different types of sensors are used. The raw
data from sensors are collected by a processor. The data are
processed and then displayed on a display. These types of
simple wearable devices are used by normal people while
jogging, running and other applications where the users look
at the display to notice the measured values of the sensors.
If the device has the feature of wireless data transmitting
capability, the data can be sent to a central station through
a transceiver. The block diagram representation of a simple
wearable wireless device is shown in Figure 2. The data
may or may not be completely processed at the sensing end
but most of the data are stored, processed in the computer
MONITORING SYSTEM