LifeMinder: A Wearable Healthcare Support System Using User's Context

This paper introduces a prototype of wearable healthcare support system ‘LifeMinder’, which consists of a wristwatch-shaped wearable sensor module and a personal digital assistant (PDA). The wearable sensor module, equipped with sensors of accelerometer, pulse meter, thermometer, galvanic skin reflex (GSR) electrodes and Bluetooth module to communicate with the PDA, monitors the user’s context: health conditions, movements and behaviors. The system uses this information to guide the user in daily self-care in real time. Diet care and exercise care are especially significant to prevent the “lifestyle-related disease”. The authors developed algorithms to recognize the user’s movement from wrist motion and to detect the beginning of a meal from pulse rates and GSR values. The accuracy of both algorithms is about 90%.