Body Area Networks for Movement Analysis in Physiotherapy Treatments

Abstract

Recent technological advances in Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) have enabled the design of lowcost, lightweight sensor nodes capable of sensing, processing and communicating different types of data. These tiny sensor nodes leverage the ideas found in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and this has lead to a large number of applications in the health sector. For example, telemonitoring is used to track, monitor and manage patient psychophysical data and help in the administration of drugs in hospitals. In this paper, we present a novel framework that exploits these ideas further, where body area WSNs and gaming have been combined to assist in physiotherapy treatments for patients with physical disabilities or ailments. The proposed framework has three main components, the body area WSN, the game, and the data acquisition manager. The body WSN is fixed to the patient's body and data is collected and stored in real-time. This data in parallel is feed directly into the control services allowing gaming objects, i.e. virtual representations of patient's, to control by physically moving his/her body parts. Whilst the patient plays the game, data is regularly collected from body sensor nodes. This allows real-time data from sensor nodes to be used by the game to adjust game levels according to the medical status of the patient. This allows treatments to be automatically adapted to maximise physiotherapy treatments and speed up recovery. In this paper, we present a working prototype that successfully demonstrates the applicability of our approach.