Preliminary study on a remote system for diagnostic-therapeutic postural measurements

The study refers to an experimental set up to achieve the remote control of a therapeutic-diagnostic system composed of (a) a local host, connected with (b) a rotating platform, (c) a helmet instrumented with transducers, (d) an audio-video acquisition system and (e) a webcam with microphone. The whole system is able to collect acquired signals related to some diagnostic parameters of a patient submitted to a body rotation applied by in an integrated service of home care assistance. On the basis of available scientific literature, the requirements of measuring and control remote system are investigated and some methods for the optimal data transmission between client (diagnostic station at hospital) and server (measurement station in home care assistance) were implemented by means of a set of virtual tools on Labview and the performances are evaluated. Sinusoidal signals were used to test the proposed device during operative conditions. Frequency sweep test signals were applied to the file server and the comparison between transmitted and received signals was adopted to estimate the effective bandwidth of the whole system. Measurements are carried out in different experimental conditions within city areas. In particular various connection types were tested, such as analogue telephone line and an asymmetric digital subscriber line: results confirm that by an appropriate bandwidth limit can be reached in order to fulfill the diagnostic system requirements.