Wireless sensors and mobile phones for human well-being

More and more people are using mobile phones for sensing and supporting their daily lives. With some signal and digital processing methods, every mobile phone could be used for sensing different activities or behaviors that people do every day. Increasingly, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being integrated with Mobile Phone Sensing (MPS) and this trend will be seen mainly in urban environments. This represents an opportunity, since both WSNs and mobile phones have the potential of being applied in the search for ”green solutions”. That is, people-centric and environment-centric ”green applications” can be developed to improve human life and the environment. It is interesting to relate these two types of applications in order to motivate people towards having a greener behavior. However, this leads to multiple challenges. This paper presents a vision about this integration and also an overview of these challenges. We will also show a case study and its implementation using the mobile phone as a sensing system, which aims to improve the people's quality of life.