Affiliations: Discipline of Health Informatics, The University of
Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Note: [] Corresponding author: Andrew Clarke, Discipline of Health
Informatics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. E-mail:
[email protected]
Abstract: The use of participatory sensing in relation to the capture of
health-related data is rapidly becoming a possibility due to the widespread
consumer adoption of emerging mobile computing technologies and sensing
platforms. This has the potential to revolutionize data collection for
population health, aspects of epidemiology, and health-related e-Science
applications and as we will describe, provide new public health intervention
capabilities, with the classifications and capabilities of such participatory
sensing platforms only just beginning to be explored. Such a development will
have important benefits for access to near real-time, large-scale, up to
population-scale data collection. However, there are also numerous issues to be
addressed first: provision of stringent anonymity and privacy within these
methodologies, user interface issues, and the related issue of how to
incentivize participants and address barriers/concerns over participation. To
provide a step towards describing these aspects, in this paper we present a
first classification of health participatory sensing models, a novel
contribution to the literature, and provide a conceptual reference architecture
for health participatory sensing networks (HPSNs) and user interaction example case study.
Keywords: Participatory sensing, public health, epidemiology, mobile health
