Using Multiple Devices for Patient Monitoring in Clinical Studies: The TOLIFE Experience

In the contemporary age of human-centered computing, smartphones, smartwatches, and IoT devices are currently being used in the medical sector for continuous monitoring of patients. Existing clinical applications generally rely on a single type of device, while the adoption of a multi-modal data collection where multiple heterogeneous devices are employed is still not adequately explored. In this paper, we present the approach of the European project TOLIFE, in which a multi-modal data collection approach is proposed to monitor the health status of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) patients. In this paper we present our experience in integrating commercial and ad-hoc devices into a single system for unobtrusive data collection, presenting the overall approach and highlighting the challenges we faced. Specific focus is offered to our experience in integrating commercial devices into the system to assess whether they are suitable for continuous monitoring in terms of fine-grained data collection and usability.