Design And Implementation Of A Wireless Body Area Network For Distributed FES System

Functional electrical stimulation(FES) has demonstrated its benefits as a clinical therapy for stroke rehabilitation. However, continuous monitoring of patients motor activities during FES rehabilitation therapy increases the work load of physical therapists. So, it’s meaningful to develop a system to assist the physical therapists with rehabilitation assessment.In this paper, a wireless body area network(WBAN) was designed and implemented to monitor movement information of stroke patients in real time. Movement information could be useful in outcome assessment of rehabilitation. The WBAN system was composed of three main components: a set of sensor nodes, a coordinator node and a system monitoring software, and it can be seamlessly integrated into the distributed functional electrical stimulation system developed previously.In addition, a short-latency, low-power communication protocol was developed to meet the clinical requirements of energy efficiency and high rate of data feed-through, which is mainly based on the superframe driven TDMA MAC protocol. And the timeslots can be allocated dynamically in TDMA MAC protocol.Finally, the prototype of the WBAN was evaluated in some network tests such as power consumption test and Transmission-error rate test, and preliminary human experiments is also used to verify the proposed system. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed wireless body area network system.