ePhysio: A Wearables-Enabled Platform for the Remote Management of Musculoskeletal Diseases

Technology advancements in wireless communication and embedded computing are fostering their evolution from standalone elements to smart objects seamlessly integrated in the broader context of the Internet of Things. In this context, wearable sensors represent the building block for new cyber-physical social systems, which aim at improving the well-being of people by monitoring and measuring their activities and provide an immediate feedback to the users. In this paper, we introduce ePhysio, a large-scale and flexible platform for sensor-assisted physiotherapy and remote management of musculoskeletal diseases. The system leverages networking and computing tools to provide real-time and ubiquitous monitoring of patients. We propose three use cases which differ in scale and context and are characterized by different human interactions: single-user therapy, indoor group therapy, and on-field therapy. For each use case, we identify the social interactions, e.g., between the patient and the physician and between different users and the performance requirements in terms of monitoring frequency, communication, and computation. We then propose three related deployments, highlighting the technologies that can be applied in a real system. Finally, we describe a proof-of-concept implementation, which demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed solution

Cyber-Physical Systems: A Literature Review

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are smart systems that depend on the synergy of cyber and physical components. They link the physical world (e.g. through sensors, actuators, robotics, and embedded systems) with the virtual world of information processing. Applications of CPS have the tremendous potential of improving convenience, comfort, and safety in our daily life. This paper provides a brief introduction to CPSs and their applications

H2B: Heartbeat-based Secret Key Generation Using Piezo Vibration Sensors

We present Heartbeats-2-Bits (H2B), which is a system for securely pairing wearable devices by generating a shared secret key from the skin vibrations caused by heartbeat. This work is motivated by potential power saving opportunity arising from the fact that heartbeat intervals can be detected energy-efficiently using inexpensive and power-efficient piezo sensors, which obviates the need to employ complex heartbeat monitors such as Electrocardiogram or Photoplethysmogram. Indeed, our experiments show that piezo sensors can measure heartbeat intervals on many different body locations including chest, wrist, waist, neck and ankle. Unfortunately, we also discover that the heartbeat interval signal captured by piezo vibration sensors has low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) because they are not designed as precision heartbeat monitors, which becomes the key challenge for H2B. To overcome this problem, we first apply a quantile function-based quantization method to fully extract the useful entropy from the noisy piezo measurements. We then propose a novel Compressive Sensing-based reconciliation method to correct the high bit mismatch rates between the two independently generated keys caused by low SNR. We prototype H2B using off-the-shelf piezo sensors and evaluate its performance on a dataset collected from different body positions of 23 participants. Our results show that H2B has an overwhelming pairing success rate of 95.6%. We also analyze and demonstrate H2B's robustness against three types of attacks. Finally, our power measurements show that H2B is very power-efficient

Mobile Databases: a Selection of Open Issues and Research Directions

International audienceThis paper reports on the main results of a specific action on mobile databases conducted by CNRS in France from October 2001 to December 2002. The objective of this action was to review the state of progress in mobile databases and identify major research directions for the French database community. Rather than provide a survey of all important issues in mobile databases, this paper gives an outline of the directions in which the action participants are now engaged, namely: copy synchronization in disconnected computing, mobile transactions, database embedded in ultra-light devices, data confidentiality, P2P dissemination models and middleware adaptability