Augmented humanity (AH) is a term that has been mentioned in several research papers. However, these papers differ in their definitions of AH. The number of publications dealing with the topic of AH is represented by a growing number of publications that increase over time, being high impact factor scientific contributions. However, this terminology is used without being formally defined. The aim of this paper is to carry out a systematic mapping review of the different existing definitions of AH and its possible application areas. Publications from 2009 to 2020 were searched in Scopus, IEEE and ACM databases, using search terms “augmented human”, ”human augmentation” and “human 2.0”. Of the 16,914 initially obtained publications, a final number of 133 was finally selected. The mapping results show a growing focus on works based on AH, with computer vision being the index term with the highest number of published articles. Other index terms are wearable computing, augmented reality, human–robot interaction, smart devices and mixed reality. In the different domains where AH is present, there are works in computer science, engineering, robotics, automation and control systems and telecommunications. This review demonstrates that it is necessary to formalize the definition of AH and also the areas of work with greater openness to the use of such concept. This is why the following definition is proposed: “Augmented humanity is a human–computer integration technology that proposes to improve capacity and productivity by changing or increasing the normal ranges of human function through the restoration or extension of human physical, intellectual and social capabilities”.
Due to the demographic ageing of the world’s population and the respective consequences, it is necessary to guarantee that older adults can be active and maintain their independence and autonomy for longer. The aim of the SmartWalk system is to promote walks in the city in order to stimulate physically active lifestyles. Body area networks are used to aggregate data collected by different type of sensors, which are transmitted to a server to support informed decisions of caregivers when planning physical activities for their care receivers. This article presents the SmartWalk system and reports an experimental setup that was developed to assess the performance of the current implementation and the respective critical components. According to the results, the SmartWalk system presents good performance in terms of battery usage, data upload, capacity to recover from connectivity failures and wireless coverage of its body area network.