Artificial Skin For Human Prostheses, Enabled Through Wireless Sensor Networks

The WiseSkin project aims at creating artificial skin that allows human patients with prosthetic limbs to regain their sense of touch. The system in charge of transferring the tactile information is based on a wireless sensor network with stringent adaptability, latency, energy and reliability constraints.This paper proposes a communication protocol aimed at enabling the WiseSkin wireless sensor network to operate under these constraints. The proposed design was chosen following the comparative evaluation of several solutions for two key issues in event-triggered low power systems: i) the energy-latency tradeoff and ii) concurrent transmissions. The evaluation was based on both analytical models and testbed experiments.In conclusion, we propose the use of concurrent transmissions in event-driven multi-hop wireless sensor networks with sporadic traffic surges. The choice is mainly driven by its superior energy efficiency, compared to traditional collision avoiding schemes, a principle with general applicability in the domain of Cyber-Physical Systems.