From Personalized Medicine to Population Health: A Survey of mHealth Sensing Techniques

Abstract

Mobile Sensing Apps have been widely used as a practical approach to collect behavioral and health-related information from individuals and provide timely intervention to promote health and well-beings, such as mental health and chronic cares. As the objectives of mobile sensing could be either \emph{(a) personalized medicine for individuals} or \emph{(b) public health for populations}, in this work we review the design of these mobile sensing apps, and propose to categorize the design of these apps/systems in two paradigms -- \emph{(i) Personal Sensing} and \emph{(ii) Crowd Sensing} paradigms. While both sensing paradigms might incorporate with common ubiquitous sensing technologies, such as wearable sensors, mobility monitoring, mobile data offloading, and/or cloud-based data analytics to collect and process sensing data from individuals, we present a novel taxonomy system with two major components that can specify and classify apps/systems from aspects of the life-cycle of mHealth Sensing: \emph{(1) Sensing Task Creation \& Participation}, \emph{(2) Health Surveillance \& Data Collection}, and \emph{(3) Data Analysis \& Knowledge Discovery}. With respect to different goals of the two paradigms, this work systematically reviews this field, and summarizes the design of typical apps/systems in the view of the configurations and interactions between these two components. In addition to summarization, the proposed taxonomy system also helps figure out the potential directions of mobile sensing for health from both personalized medicines and population health perspectives.