Wireless Distributed Architecture for Therapeutic Functional Electrical Stimulation: a technology to design network-based muscle control

This paper presents a distributed Functional Electrical Stimulation architecture based on a wireless network, for therapeutic training of disabled patients. On this distributed architecture, a global controller can pilot a set of stimulation and acquisition units and modify dynamically stimulation and acquisition parameters. This solution intend to be a tool for researchers and therapist to develop closed-loop control algorithms and strategies for therapeutic rehabilitation applications with external FES, in a clinical context. In a wireless network-based control, the variable delay introduced by the network must be taken into account to ensure the stability of the closed loop. Thus, in order to characterize the medium on which the control is performed, we carried out accurate measurements of the architecture performances (stack-crossing, round-trip time, etc.).