A Smart Sensor Architecture for eHealth Applications

The diffusion of cheap sensing and programmable hardware systems enables today the quick design of complex smart sensor devices, i.e. sensing systems equipped with computational and communication functionalities, ready to be included in IoT systems. In this paper we present a general software architecture for the implementation of such smart sensors. The goal of the proposed model is to provide a reference framework usable in multiple scenarios, suitable for the management of different sensors, and providing a general and standard interface and simple computational functionalities. The paper presents our model, examples of different smart sensors based on our model and the implementation, test and performance assessment of a simple analogue smart sensor. The implementation of the proposed model is available online as a template for the design and development of smart sensors equipped with updatable edge computing functionalities. The performance evaluation of our analogue smart sensor shows that the application of our model has limited overhead which is highly compensated by its flexibility.