Abstract

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people are affected by a neurological related disease or lesion causing partial or complete dysfunction of one or more limbs. Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) techniques have resulted in significant improvement in mobility and function for many of these patients. FES relies on one or more sensors to trigger stimulation. These sensors usually have to be placed distal from the stimulation unit and this has necessitated the use of a robust wired link. However, wires are often rejected by patients due to physical impracticality and cosmesis. The obvious solution is to replace the wired system with a wireless network. However, as a consequence of the safety implications inherent in this application, any wireless network of this type should approach the reliability of the existing wired system and also achieve acceptable transmission latencies. This paper investigates the feasibility of a wireless FES system composed of a sensor node placed in the shoe connected by wireless link to a stimulation node. The experimental results of reliability and transmission latency experiments performed on the system in both laboratory and under real-world conditions show acceptable and repeatable performance with and without sources of interference.