The Andrew P. Sage award for best paper published in the Transactions of the SMC Society for 2014 is “Enabling effective programming and flexible management of efficient body sensor network applications” by Giancarlo Fortino, Roberta Giannantonio, Raffaele Gravina, Philip Kuryloski, Roozbeh Jafari, published in the Transactions on Human Machine Systems 43(1):115-133.
Winning Paper
Enabling Effective Programming and Flexible Management of Efficient Body Sensor Network Applications
Abstract
The paper [1] addressed and solved challenging issues that limited the wide diffusion of wireless body sensor networks (BSNs) in real life contexts by providing novel methodological and technological solutions that are both effective and efficient. In particular, the tackled issues primarily concern the programming complexity of BSN systems due to the lack of domain-specific high-level software abstractions. After analyzing and comparing the state-of-the- art solutions for BSN programming, and after eliciting the most important requirements for an effective BSN-specific software framework, which enable efficient signal-processing-intensive applications, we presented the SPINE (Signal Processing In-Node Enviroment) middleware, an open-source domain-specific programming framework designed to support rapid prototyping and flexible management of BSN applications. We notably described how SPINE efficiently addresses the elicited requirements while providing performance analysis on the most common BSN-oriented hardware/software sensor platforms. Effectiveness of SPINE was demonstrated through practical examples related to high-impact BSN applications (e.g. activity monitoring, physical rehabilitation, gait analysis, emotion and gesture detection) that were entirely developed using SPINE. Finally, the paper presented a novel development methodology for BSN applications that reuses the well-known Platform Based Design concepts and the SPINE platform.
Keywords – Design methods for wearable computing, human-centered applications, sensor- programming frameworks, signal processing in node environment (SPINE), wireless body sensor networks (BSNs).
