Augmenting forearm crutches with wireless sensors for lower limb rehabilitation

Forearm crutches are frequently used in the rehabilitation of an injury to the lower limb. The recovery rate is improved if the patient correctly applies a certain fraction of their body weight (specified by a clinician) through the axis of the crutch, referred to as partial weight bearing (PWB). Incorrect weight bearing has been shown to result in an extended recovery period or even cause further damage to the limb. There is currently no minimally invasive tool for long-term monitoring of a patient's PWB in a home environment. This paper describes the research and development of an instrumented forearm crutch that has been developed to wirelessly and autonomously monitor a patient's weight bearing over the full period of their recovery, including its potential use in a home environment. A pair of standard forearm crutches are augmented with low-cost off-the-shelf wireless sensor nodes and electronic components to provide indicative measurements of the applied weight, crutch tilt and hand position on the grip. Data are wirelessly transmitted between crutches and to a remote computer (where they are processed and visualized in LabVIEW), and the patient receives biofeedback by means of an audible signal when they put too much or too little weight through the crutch. The initial results obtained highlight the capability of the instrumented crutch to support physiotherapists and patients in monitoring usage

Experimental trade-offs between different strategies for multihop communications evaluated over real deployments of wireless sensor network for environmental monitoring

Although much work has been done since wireless sensor networks appeared, there is not a great deal of information available on real deployments that incorporate basic features associated with these networks, in particular multihop routing and long lifetimes features. In this article, an environmental monitoring application (Internet of Things oriented) is described, where temperature and relative humidity samples are taken by each mote at a rate of 2 samples/min and sent to a sink using multihop routing. Our goal is to analyse the different strategies to gather the information from the different motes in this context. The trade-offs between 'sending always' and 'buffering locally' approaches were analysed and validated experimentally, taking into account power consumption, lifetime, efficiency and reliability. When buffering locally, different options were considered such as saving in either local RAM or FLASH memory, as well different alternatives to reduce overhead with different packet sizes. The conclusion is that in terms of energy and durability, the best option is to reduce the overhead. Nevertheless, sending larger packets is not worthy when the probability of retransmission is high. If real-time monitoring is required, then sending always is better than buffering locally

Enabling Cyber Physical Systems with Wireless Sensor Networking Technologies

[[abstract]]Over the last few years, we have witnessed a growing interest in Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) that rely on a strong synergy between computational and physical components. CPSs are expected to have a tremendous impact on many critical sectors (such as energy, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, aerospace, etc) of the economy. CPSs have the ability to transform the way human-to-human, human-toobject, and object-to-object interactions take place in the physical and virtual worlds. The increasing pervasiveness of Wireless Sensor Networking (WSN) technologies in many applications make them an important component of emerging CPS designs. We present some of the most important design requirements of CPS architectures. We discuss key sensor network characteristics that can be leveraged in CPS designs. In addition, we also review a few well-known CPS application domains that depend on WSNs in their design architectures and implementations. Finally, we present some of the challenges that still need to be addressed to enable seamless integration of WSN with CPS designs.[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]紙