Configurable Medical Cyber-Physical System Framework for Physical Activity Monitoring

Abstract

A digital twin facilitates the means to monitor, understand, and optimize the functions of the physical entity and provides continuous feedback to improve quality of life, and Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS) is an integral part of this vision. Many studies focus on human motion to digitize data for further analysis. The literature review presented here emphasizes on gait analysis and gait events detection using wearable devices, which compare results by testing on different groups of individuals. Amongst those, there is a focus on digitizing activities for athletes and sports activities. However, there is a lack of research that address configurability for this type of MCPS. Adding new physical devices to an established MCPS requires manual configuration. Recent studies either solve the issue of users’ mobility by providing a wireless solution with local storage, or sacrifice mobility in order to provide real-time information through wired communication. However, group physical activity applications, such as sports coaching and group physiotherapy, use customized devices that need to be automatically configured in the system. In addition, these systems need to support mobility and real-time data presentation. To solve this problem, a framework is proposed to design a wellbeing Cyber-Physical System (CPS) that focuses on system configurability, providing real-time data of body sensor networks while supporting wireless and mobile communication. A communication protocol is proposed to allow seamless integration and communication of system components, and to enable bandwidth-conscious data transmission. As a proof of concept, a configurable CPS for gait activities monitoring is designed to read, visualize, and backup spatiotemporal data from one or more multi-sensory physical devices over conventional Wi-Fi and in real-time. Two experiments were performed using the implemented CPS. The first experiment was performed outdoors and tested if the CPS components would recognize each other and work seamlessly over foreign networks while providing usable information. The second experiment was performed in collaboration with the Health Sciences Department using our system and the Tekscan Strideway gait mat simultaneously to compare results and to ensure accuracy. In addition, this experiment tested configurability of the system by using different measurement devices for different users.