In searching for devices with wireless health sensors I'm starting to uncover that we're really on the brink of these things going mainstream. I'm really getting excited about it. I've mentioned the Fitbit elsewhere as a consumer grade version. Everytime I search now I'm finding more and more developments and products reaching maturity.
Under the term wireless body area networks (WBANS) reports that the market for wireless personal health sensors are set to takeoff and wireless health has killed the stethoscope are growing in number. I find the new term for mobile health (mHealth) has popped up along with many others,
This is the emerging trend that supports so many of my goals. So I plan to update this over time. first I want to get a fitbit to see if it can do what it claims to well enough. I want this to be part of my mobile phone so I don't have multiple devices to carry around but the android roadmap is not being kept up to date so I can't see when this might come.
For now I just accept it's a young emerging market that, I think, will quickly gain ground and support.
I've just read a little more about SPINE (Signal processing in node environment) and it's actually quite exciting because they talk about porting SPINE to Android, maybe as soon as 2.0. I looked a little further in their manual and see that the code for sensors actually matches that used in Android implying that porting may not be as difficult as I first assumed. their code is java based, their just using tinyos instead of android. So maybe there is possibility.
I'm looking for something open source, unfortunately specknet is not, something that fits android, something with a community, and something I could use soon. SPINE fits three of these requirements at least so it's the front runner for me at the moment. The only concern I have is that there has been no news update since september 2008 so I need to confirm the project is still running.
Well I'm even more impressed with SPINE. I contacted Roberta Giannantonio to find out a bit more and see if they're still work on the project. I received a response almost immediately welcoming me and thanking me for me interest. Sounds like a really nice bunch of people to be working with and I love it when people get back really promptly to a random request like mine.
It seems they still chat via mailing lists so I checked out the developer archives. the most recent post is november 13th 2009 so it is active. One post on total energy unit is, for me, an exciting hint of things to come. This is exactly the kind of thing I want because I want to understand howe playing tennis and other sports affects my body. I want tools that will help me analyse this.
Roberta confirmed that part of the spine community has plans to run on Android. First I want to learn more about spine lab.and then see what it is I can contribute.
edit: 20100202
turns out the area is also known as mHeatlh. I found alist of mobile hand held health care devices and open platforms and http://www.androidmedapps.com/index.php/category/health-informatics/
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