Cyber-physical system (CPS) is an integration of physical processes with computation and communication. It has the ability to add more intelligence to social life. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) can be a vital part of CPS as strong sensing capability is one of the major driving factors for CPS applications. CPS is still considered to be a nascent technology, and there are many challenges yet to be addressed. A few CPS applications in healthcare have been proposed to date, and they lack the flexibility of technology integration, such as integration of computing resources with sensor networks. This paper presents a survey of CPS in healthcare applications that have been proposed to date by academia as well as industry. A comprehensive taxonomy is also provided that characterizes and classifies different components and methods that are required for the application of CPS in healthcare. The taxonomy not only highlights the similarities and differences of the state-of-the-art technologies utilized in CPS for healthcare from the perspective of WSN and Cloud Computing but also identifies the areas that require further research. It is expected that this taxonomy and its mapping to relevant systems will be highly useful for further development of CPS for healthcare.

Foot pathologies can negatively influence foot function, consequently impairing gait during daily activity, and severely impacting an individual’s quality of life. These pathologies are often painful and correspond with high or abnormal plantar pressure, which can result in asymmetry in the pressure distribution between the two feet. There is currently no general consensus on the presence of asymmetry in able-bodied gait, and plantar pressure analysis during gait is in dire need of a standardized method to quantify asymmetry. This paper investigates the use of plantar pressure asymmetry for pathological gait diagnosis. The results of this study involving plantar pressure analysis in fifty one participants (31 healthy and 20 with foot pathologies) support the presence of plantar pressure asymmetry in normal gait. A higher level of asymmetry was detected at the majority of the regions in the feet of the pathological population, including statistically significant differences in the plantar pressure asymmetry in two regions of the foot, metatarsophalangeal joint 3 (MPJ3) and the lateral heel. Quantification of plantar pressure asymmetry may prove to be useful for the identification and diagnosis of various foot pathologies.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are vulnerable to various sensor faults and faulty measurements. This vulnerability hinders efficient and timely response in various WSN applications, such as healthcare. For example, faulty measurements can create false alarms which may require unnecessary intervention from healthcare personnel. Therefore, an approach to differentiate between real medical conditions and false alarms will improve remote patient monitoring systems and quality of healthcare service afforded by WSN. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to detect sensor anomaly by analyzing collected physiological data from medical sensors. The objective of this method is to effectively distinguish false alarms from true alarms. It predicts a sensor value from historic values and compares it with the actual sensed value for a particular instance. The difference is compared against a threshold value, which is dynamically adjusted, to ascertain whether the sensor value is anomalous. The proposed approach has been applied to real healthcare datasets and compared with existing approaches. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, providing high Detection Rate (DR) and low False Positive Rate (FPR).

The key obstacle to communicating images over wireless sensor networks has been the lack of suitable processing architecture and communication strategies to deal with the large volume of data. High packet error rates and the need for retransmission make it inefficient in terms of energy and bandwidth. This paper presents novel architecture and protocol for energy efficient image processing and communication over wireless sensor networks. Practical results show the effectiveness of these approaches to make image communication over wireless sensor networks feasible, reliable and efficient.

Magnetic sensing technology offers an attractive alternative for in vivo tracking with much better performance than RF and ultrasound technologies. In this paper, an efficient in vivo magnetic tracking system is presented. The proposed system is intended to localize an endoscopic capsule which delivers biomarkers around specific locations of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. For efficiently localizing a magnetic marker inside the capsule, a mathematical model has been developed for the magnetic field around a cylindrical magnet and used with a localization algorithm that provides minimum error and fast computation. The proposed tracking system has much reduced complexity compared to the ones reported in the literature to date. Laboratory tests and in vivo animal trials have demonstrated the suitability of the proposed system for tracking a magnetic marker with expected accuracy.