Review: Wireless sensor networks for rehabilitation applications: Challenges and opportunities
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
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Wireless sensor networks are becoming a topic of great interest in medical applications generating a large amount of work in medical and computer research communities. In this line, several solutions have been proposed to provide unobtrusive, flexible and low cost systems for patient supervision. However, existing solutions can not be used in rehabilitation supervision because of the specific characteristics of this application. Indeed, new major challenges arise from the fact that each sensor node needs to continuously stream large volumes of data at a high rate to enable doctors to extract clinically relevant information. In addition, the placement of several adjacent sensor nodes on the body may cause serious interferences problems. In this work, we describe and demonstrate our wireless sensor network prototype for high-fidelity rehabilitation supervision. Our demonstration allows attendees to experience the potential of wireless sensor networks for enabling flexible and low cost rehabilitation monitoring systems. In order to alleviate transmission problems, we develop a novel communication protocol that meets the clinical requirements of rehabilitation supervision in terms of data quality and data rate.