ManySense: An Extensible and Accessible Middleware for Consumer-Oriented Heterogeneous Body Sensor Networks

Abstract

Consumer-oriented wearable sensors such as smart watches are becoming popular, but each manufacturer uses its own data access mechanism. At the same time, the need for inferred context data is increasing in context-aware applications. A system is needed to provide a unified access to heterogeneous wearable devices for context-aware application developers. We propose ManySense—an Android-based middleware for heterogeneous consumer-oriented BSNs. Extensibility is achieved through adapter interfaces which allow sensors and context inferencing algorithms to be coupled with the middleware. Accessibility of the middleware allows third party applications to access raw sensor data and inferred context data uniformly. This paper provides two main contributions which are divided into several outcomes: (1) design and implementation of the ManySense BSN middleware that allows low-effort addition of new sensors and context inferencing algorithms through adapter interfaces, provides unified access to optionally filtered sensor data and inferred context data for third party applications, mediates control queries to sensor adapters and context inferencing adapters, and facilitates adapter development through an SDK and (2) evaluation of ManySense by comparing its performance with manual sensor data acquisition, analysis of ManySense's extensibility through adapter interfaces, and analysis of ManySense's accessibility from third party applications.