Wireless sensor networks for rehabilitation applications: Challenges and opportunities

Rehabilitation supervision has emerged as a new application of wireless sensor networks (WSN), with unique communication, signal processing and hardware design requirements. It is a broad and complex interdisciplinary research area on which more than one hundred papers have been published by several research communities (electronics, bio-mechanical, control and computer science). In this paper, we present WSN for rehabilitation supervision with a focus on key scientific and technical challenges that have been solved as well as interdisciplinary challenges that are still open. We thoroughly review existing projects conducted by several research communities involved in this exciting field. Furthermore, we discuss the open research issues and give directions for future research works. Our aim is to gather information that encourage engineers, clinicians and computer scientists to work together in this field to tackle the arising challenges. We believe that bridging researchers with different scientific backgrounds could have a significant impact on the development of WSN for rehabilitation and could improve the way rehabilitation is provided today.