Measurements and Sensors
for Motion Tracking in
Motor Rehabilitation
Luca De Vito, Octavian Postolache, and Sergio Rapuano
I
n the years, the role of measurement in medicine and
healthcare is becoming increasingly relevant, thanks to
the always-wider diffusion of electronics in everyday
life. In particular, measurement and sensors represent one of
the key aspects of what is called pervasive healthcare. Perva-
sive healthcare may be defined as the application of pervasive
computing technologies for healthcare, as well as the way to
make healthcare available everywhere, anytime and to every-
one, and aims at changing the healthcare delivery model from
doctor-centric to patient-centric, from acute-reactive to contin-
uous preventing, and from sampling to monitoring [1].
In particular, among the different fields of medicine and
healthcare, the role of measurement and sensors is particularly
significant in physical rehabilitation, where objective mea-
surements are needed to evaluate and keep track of the motor
capabilities of the patients needing or being subjected to a re-
habilitation treatment.
For example, an important parameter, both in determin-
ing the motion capability of the patient and in monitoring their
progresses during the rehabilitation treatment, is the Range Of
Motion (ROM), which is defined as the amount of movement
through a particular plane, expressed in degrees, that can oc-
cur in a joint [2]. To measure the ROM, traditional mechanical
instrumentation, such as the universal protractor, which is
widespread in the common rehabilitation practice, is being re-
placed by electronic instrumentation.
Electronic instrumentation allows measuring the ROM,
even in dynamic conditions, such as during walking or mov-
ing, which can have different values than those observed
during a physical exam.
In addition, measurements by means of electronic instru-
mentation show several further advantages:
◗◗ measurements are easy to read and to understand, as they
can be directly presented as digits;
◗◗ the results are highly reproducible as the measurement
procedure doesn’t involve a human operator;
◗◗ the measurement signals can be processed by means of
analog or digital processing techniques;
◗◗ the measurement rate can be adjusted according to the
30 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine June 2014
1094-6969/14/$25.00©2014IEEE
treatment specifications and specific methods can be
designed to monitor the trend of the quantity of interest
for a long period;
◗◗ the measurement results can be easily stored and inte-
grated with the patient digital record; and
◗◗ the measurement results can be easily sent to remote
monitoring systems, which allows following the patient
at home.
Electronic measurements can be helpful in several phases
of the rehabilitation process for the assessment of the patient’s
motor capabilities before starting a treatment, monitoring the
progress of the patient during the treatment, and optimizing
and adapting to the patient’s personal needs with some suit-
able devices, allowing the patient to be functional with a not
recoverable or not fully gained motor capability [3].
In the first case, the evaluation is commonly carried out in
laboratories equipped with suitable instrumentation, aiming
at accurately collecting information about the whole motor
capabilities of the patient. In the second case, according to
the pervasive healthcare model, portable and often wear-
able systems are proposed, which are capable of continuously
monitoring the patient’s activity or treatment, even in his/her
home environment. In the third case, research has proposed
suitable designs, configurations, or optimization of equip-
ment, enabling the patient to perform specific functions, like
walking or moving an object.
This paper presents a brief overview of the commercial
solutions and the research proposals for measuring the pa-
tient’s movements, and is organized as follows. In Section 1,
a review of laboratory measurement equipment for the pa-
tient’s mobility evaluation will be described. In Sections 2 and
3, some proposals of portable measurement systems, used to
monitor the patient or track his/her progresses during the
treatment at home and in clinical environments, are presented
and discussed.
Laboratory Equipment
Laboratory equipment for measuring human motion is de-
signed to work in a restricted controlled environment;
Fig. 1. (a) An example of passive markers. (b) and (c) Their appearance on the
acquired images from two different infrared cameras. Used with permission [8]
however, it needs to track specific points of the human body
with high accuracy. Such equipment mostly relies on captur-
ing the motion of different body segments using cameras.
Identifying body segments to track can be done following two
methods, depending on whether it is based on markers or not.
The following sub-sections will discuss the two approaches.
Marker-Based Motion Capture and Analysis
Systems
In the marker-based motion capture and analysis, a set of
markers is placed onto anatomical parts of interest. Their loca-
tion by means of a set of detectors produces, via triangulation,
streams of three-dimensional coordinates that represent posi-
tions of the body segments in a reference system.
Commercial marker-based tracking systems are quite of-
ten used as a golden standard in human motion analysis due to
their accurate position information (position errors are around
1 mm) [4].
Some systems, such as BTS SMART-DX [5], Vicon [6], or
Qualisys [7], use as detectors, sets of infrared cameras and light
emitting sources, and are capable of accurately tracking the po-
sition of some passive reflective markers in the 3D space using
triangulation.
In Fig. 1a, an example of passive markers is shown and
their images acquired by two different infrared cameras are re-
ported in Fig. 1b and Fig. 1c [8]. As it can be seen, it is quite easy
to identify the position of the markers in each infrared image,
since markers appear much brighter than anything else.
Once the marker position has been determined in each 2D
image, a triangulation algorithm is applied to determine their
position in the 3D space. This triangulation algorithm first
looks for the displacement of the same marker in the differ-
ent images. Starting from this displacement, the depth of the
marker can be obtained and therefore, its position in the 3D
space.
June 2014 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 31
Fig. 2. (a) The Codamotion system. (b) A scheme of the masked linear array.
The marker creates a shadow on a sensor array depending on its position [9].
Other systems, such as the Codamotion’s one [9], make use
of active markers. In this case, infrared signals flashed by the
active markers are captured by means of suitable detectors.
Three Masked Linear Arrays (MLAs) in each detector unit
combine to measure x-, y-, and z-coordinates of each active
marker, providing the 3D position measurement. The MLAs
measure the pattern produced when a marker casts a shadow
on an array through a grid of lines (Fig. 2).
The goal of a marker-based system is often made easier by
introducing the aid of a color-based algorithm. The authors of
[10] discussed the usage of different color belts tied to body
joints, and compared the accuracy of a system relying on color
tracking with a commercial marker-based solution. To make
such a comparison, target-reaching movements were carried
out and captured with three cameras after having attached
markers and belts to shoulder, elbow, and wrist. Cycles of tar-
get-reaching movements were executed at various speeds, and
data produced by the two systems referring to shoulder angle
and elbow angle were shown to have an absolute difference of
less than, respectively, 5° and 8° and a correlation coefficient
greater than 0.99.
The main drawback of using optical detectors to find the
markers is that rotated joints or overlapped body parts cannot
be detected, even when using active light emitting markers,
and hence 3D rendering is not available [4]. This drawback
is only partially overcome by placing several detectors all
around the patient, like in the BTS SMART-DX system (Fig.1),
instead of on the same side of them.
In marker-based vision motion measurement systems, im-
age processing is reduced due to the use of infrared light, since
markers are much brighter than anything else in the acquired
images, so that their position can be easily identified. The ca-
pability of such systems of detecting the motion depends on
the camera resolution, on the frame rate, and on the number
of cameras used. As an example, the SMART-DX 7000 model,
having a camera resolution of 4 Mpixel and a frame rate (at
the maximum resolution) of 500 frame per second, can reach
an accuracy of 0.1 mm. Systems using passive markers can
fail in the marker identification and tracking [11], so that the
intervention of an operator is required if the trend of some
measurements versus time is needed.
Marker-less Motion Capture and Analysis Systems
The marker-less motion capture and analysis systems are
mainly focused on removing the need of precise positioning of
markers on the body segments of the patient and on overcom-
ing the problem of shadowed markers during motion.
The research in this area has been very active in the last
years and it is still ongoing due to several unsolved issues.
Marker-less motion capture systems can be classified into
model-based and model-free approaches. In the model-based
approach, an a priori model with relevant anatomic and kine-
matic information is tracked or matched to 2D planes or 3D
representations. Model-free approaches attempt to capture
skeleton features without using an a priori model [12].
A model-based system works by executing the following
steps:
◗◗ Since camera lenses introduce nonlinear distortion, in a
first phase, such distortion is corrected in each camera
using data from a preliminary calibration phase.
◗◗ The subject of interest is extracted from the background
from each acquired image.
◗◗ A 3D representation of the subject is obtained by merging
the information of each acquired image, thus obtaining
the hull of the human body.
◗◗ The 3D representation is matched against a specific model,
including morphology and kinematics information.
◗◗ Finally, the motion information is extracted from the
matching.
The model-free systems, instead, after obtaining the 3D
representation, remove the pose-depending non-linearities
by transforming the 3D representation to a pose-invariant
space. Then, a segmentation is performed in the pose-invariant
space, to find the points corresponding to the different body
parts. Finally, the motion information is extracted by looking
at the position and orientation in the 3D space of the identi-
fied segments.
An example of a camera-based marker-less motion capture
and analysis system is given in [13], where image classifica-
tion technology made hand recognition and tracking possible
32 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine June 2014
so as to replace a mouse with hand operating in a visual inter-
face. The goal of the system is to check whether a patient under
observation is adequately reproducing a set of predefined tra-
jectories, with different complexity, by matching the curves
resulting from performing exercises with the relative tem-
plates. The performance of the system in hand tracking was
evaluated through an index obtained by computing Fitts’s law,
which is an empirical model applied to determine the quality
of a pointing device for visual interfaces. Given the size of a
target object in a visual environment and its distance from the
pointer, Fitts’s law essentially takes into account the time nec-
essary for the pointer to reach the object. The precision of the
pointer driven by a bare hand was the criterion that led the
validation.
A marker-less motion capture system has been used in [14]
to measure the dynamic trend of the Center of Pressure (CoP)
and the Center of Mass (CoM). The CoP is the location of the
vertical ground reaction force. The CoM is the point where the
mass of the body is balanced in all directions. CoP measure-
ments resulted to be in good accordance with those measured
by a force plate. In addition, such systems allow measuring
the CoM, by considering a more complete human model, in-
stead of the simple inverted pendulum that should be used in
the case of force plate measurements. The system makes use of
videos acquired by eight VGA cameras. Processing of the hu-
man model is executed in real-time, while almost ten seconds
are needed to evaluate the CoM.
It is necessary to note that the marker-free visual tracking
techniques have been partially successful in real situations.
However, the proposed algorithms and systems still need to be
improved to compromise robustness and efficiency [4].
The current proposals involving cameras to capture the
motion of body parts without markers share the same main
limitations: high difficulty to capture entire body movements,
the higher processing power required, much lower position
measurement precision when compared with the marker-
based systems, and the impossibility to track shadowed
segments.
Robot-Based and Exoskeleton Systems
Motion measurements can be obtained as output of in-
strumented robot or exoskeleton systems consisting of a
mechanical limb that the patient moves according to specific
target trajectories. The robot limb is equipped with position
and movement sensors and can be equipped with actua-
tors, which help the patient during the movement execution.
A proposal of this type is the automatic system named MIT-
MANUS, designed to move, guide, or perturb the movement
of a patient’s upper limb while recording motion-related
quantities, e.g., position, velocity, or forces applied [15]. A com-
mercial version of MIT-MANUS is available from Inmotion
Company [16].
Another commercial example is Tecnobody MJS [17],
which is equipped with a mechanical arm to be positioned
parallel to the patient’s arm. It allows the patient to move in a
3D space, while their movements are tracked and shown on a
display. Such systems do not need precise marker positioning
as the sensors are mounted on the exoskeleton, nor a 360° de-
tector system as the sensing principles are not vision-based. As
a result, the main advantages of the exoskeleton based systems
over the marker-based ones for the laboratory assessment of
the patients’ ROM are that they require less space and do not
need long patient preparation before taking the measures. The
main disadvantage is that they are bulky and heavy. Usually,
they can be adopted to track the motion of small parts of the
body (limbs).

Vision Systems and Virtual Reality for

Motor Rehabilitation
Effective rehabilitation programs assist patients in optimiz-
ing their level of physical capabilities, thus reducing the length
of patient stay, re-admission rates, and use of primary care
resources. To reach the optimal rehabilitation and remote re-
habilitation [18], virtual reality [19] appears as an appropriate
solution. The virtual reality represents a technology that al-
lows the user to directly interact with a computer-simulated
environment during serious video games [20]. Serious video
games are not designed for pure entertainment, but have more
serious purposes that make them proper for education, scien-
tific exploration, health care, emergency management, city
planning, or engineering. Currently, common systems such as
Nintendo Wii, ASUS Xtion, or Microsoft Kinect are used as af-
fordable virtual reality platforms in an important number of
serious games for physical therapy as reported in [21] and [22],
easily allowing the repetition of exercises that may reduce the
rehabilitation period. The Microsoft Kinect is a sensing plat- Fig. 3. (a) The dot patterns projected by Microsoft Kinect. (b) A scheme of the
form that includes an infrared (IR) projector and an IR depth triangulation using the positions of the projector and the infrared sensor.
sensor. The projector emits IR light beams and the depth sen- [25] that developed a framework to estimate joint angles in
sor reads the IR dot pattern reflected (Fig. 3a). The reflected common physiotherapy tasks.
beams are converted into depth information measuring the Considering natural interaction requirements for physical
distance between an object and the sensor (Fig. 3b). This makes therapy serious games, the Kinect sensor is exclusively used in
capturing a depth image possible [23], which is very important this kind of applications [26]–[28] without adding sensors such
to extract, also the gesture information during rehabilitation as inertial sensors. These sensors could be considered only for
sessions. validation of measurements such as angles and velocity per-
A comparison work reported in [24] sought to evaluate the formed with Kinect.
accuracy of Microsoft Kinect as a motion capture system by
analyzing discrepancies on obtainable upper-body and lower- Personal Motion Measurement
body joint angles with those resulting from a marker-based Systems Based on Sensor Networks
technique with multiple cameras from Vicon. Different exer- Personal and body area measurement systems have been pro-
cises were observed, each of them involving one main joint posed as a way to continuously monitor the patient during the
in the knee, hip, and shoulder. For each of the exercises, a mo- rehabilitation treatment, to make the doctors aware of their
tion clip was produced. The systems showed correlation in progress. In addition, they can be used to collect data for bio-
that synchronization and same patterns could be seen on joint feedback systems, where the patient’s motivation of doing
angle trajectories from all clips. Every clip was then charac- rehabilitation can be increased by showing their results. The
terized by means of average absolute error and average error requirements of pervasive healthcare, in fact, cannot be ful-
relative to ROM that was determined by averaging the differ- filled by vision-based systems, due to the inherent restriction
ence of the joint angle between Kinect and Vicon systems over of such systems about the monitored area. Instead, inertial
all the clip frames. and magnetic sensors have long proven to be more comfort-
Considering the accuracy values provided by the Kinect able for home rehabilitation applications, as they can work
sensor, some papers propose to combine inertial sensors such under the most common circumstances without any partic-
as accelerometers and gyroscope with a Kinect sensor. Good ular constraint on lighting or space. Inertial measurement
results were obtained using this combination by A. Bo, et al systems are composed of different nodes attached to the body

June 2014 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 33

parts whose movement must be monitored. To track all the inated Qk module, were designed and implemented ensuring
movements of a body part, each node, often called an Inertial compatibility with Bluetooth and ZigBee networks. The block
Measurement Unit (IMU), is usually equipped with a 3-axial diagram of the Qk module is presented in Fig. 5.
accelerometer, providing dc-coupled linear acceleration, and a The Qk module has been designed relying on a
3-axial gyroscope, which provides angular speed. Often, a 3-ax- PIC24FJ64GB002 MCU and including a specific wireless trans-
ial magnetometer is present that measures Earth’s magnetic ceiver for each communication type. A battery connector and
field, thus forming a nine degrees of freedom MARG (Mag- a board-to-board connector (Qk connector) have been associ-
netic, Angular Rate, and Gravity) Unit. An additional wireless ated with a digital interface (UART1) of the MCU in order to
communication module, equipped with small batteries, could link the module to a Qk device and to use external batteries.
provide each node with the capability of transmitting the mea- The Qk connector includes transmit and receive serial commu-
surement results without restraining the patient movements. In nication lines that can be used to implement a UART or an SPI
this case, the wireless nodes form a small network, surrounding interface. The MCU-wireless transceiver interfacing, instead,
the patient’s body, called a Body Area Sensor Network (BASN). is performed using the five interface pins associated with
Some commercial solutions include that proposed by Xsens UART1 or SPI interface of the MCU.
[29], which consists of a set of IMU sensors covering the whole The interoperability between the Qk device and the dif-
body and connected to each other via Xbus. A complete wire- ferent Qk modules has been granted implementing a specific
less miniature solution has been proposed in [30]. The research MCU-to-MCU communication on the UART1 interface, using
in this field, however, continues and is directed towards al- C under MPLAB X. By joining a Qk device and a Qk module,
ways-smaller systems with new architectures, such as those a Qk node is obtained able of working under different types of
to be included in suits and textiles, as well as towards devel- wireless networks.
oping more accurate algorithms for the estimation of the body To collect data coming from the Qk nodes, two types of
part orientations. USB interface units have been developed for a PC or a laptop,
In the next sections, some recent proposals for the BASN including a communication module for ZigBee or Bluetooth
hardware and software components are briefly summarized. networks. In the case of the ZigBee unit, the USB module has
the role of coordinator of the BASN.
BASN Hardware Subsystems Design and A Qk host software running on a PC, a laptop, even a tab-
Realization let computer, or a smart phone provides communication,
Considering the interoperability and modularity require- advanced data processing, data storage and graphical user in-
ments for BASNs, a novel distributed measurement system for terface (GUI) for the system. The GUI can show the evolution
vital signs and motor ac-
tivity monitoring has been
proposed in [31] and [32].
The sensor node is com-
posed of two modules to
allow independent design
of the communication stan-
dard and the IMU.
The IMU module,
named Qk motion device,
is composed of a 3D gyro-
scope (L3G4200D) and a 3D
accelerometer-magnetom-
eter (LSM303DLHC). The
data coming from the sen-
sors through an I2C digital
communication protocol
is processed by means of
a PIC24F32KA302 micro-
controller unit (MCU) to
extract accurate informa-
tion about orientation and
motion tracking. The Qk
motion device architecture
is presented in Fig. 4.
Two types of commu-
nication modules, denom- Fig. 4. A Qk motion device block diagram and implementation.

34 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine June 2014

Fig. 5. A Qk Module. (a) A block diagram. (b) Bluetooth Qk module implementation. [32]

of the acceleration, angle rate, and magnetic angular rate for
a motor activity sequence including walking, running, and
jumping.
BASN Algorithms for Estimating Body
Part Orientation
The accurate measurement of orientation using IMU or MARG
units, such as the Qk motion module, plays a critical role in
human motion analysis, especially during the rehabilitation
sessions. Data fusion algorithms are used to increase the orien-
tation accuracy using data from gyroscopes, accelerometers,
and magnetometers. However, the choice of the right algo-
rithm is strictly dependent on the computing capability of the
processing hardware. The higher the computing capability the
higher will be the power consumption and therefore, the lower
will be the autonomy of the processing unit. Usually a trade-off
between mobility of the processing units and precision of the
orientation-estimating algorithm has to be found.
The Kalman filter sensor data fusion algorithm has become
the accepted basis for the majority of orientation algorithms
for accurate estimation of Euler angles (yaw, roll, pitch)
through the gyroscope drift error reduction [33]–[35]. This
kind of approach adds a large computational load to the pro-
cessing systems associated with the IMUs, thus limiting the
usage of this kind of algorithm for the systems where the mo-
bility and autonomy are challenging requirements.
Alternative algorithms that provide effective performance
for relatively low computational expense are presented in [36]
and [37], which are associated with microcontroller-based im-
plementation. The Madgwick algorithm [36] uses a quaternion
representation, which allows accelerometer and magnetome-
ter data to be used in an analytically derived and optimized
gradient descent algorithm that was also considered as part
of Qk Motion firmware. In this case, the digital filter calcu-
lates the orientation by numerically integrating the estimated
orientation rate. This is computed as the rate of change of

Fig. 6. Results of the validation of the home rehabilitation system in [39], when a vertical (a) and horizontal (b) flexion movement of the elbow is carried out by a
healthy subject. The elbow joint angle is displayed when evaluated by the BTS LAM (blue continuous line) and the system in [39] (red dashed line).

June 2014 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 35

orientation measured by the gyroscopes. The magnitude of
the gyroscope measurement error is removed in the direction
of the estimated error, which is computed from accelerometer
and magnetometer measurements.
A different solution can be found when the mobility of a pa-
tient is limited within a given space, like their home. In such cases
in fact, a PC with enough processing power and Internet access is
often available. Therefore, the processing power needed for the
orientation algorithms could be almost entirely assigned to the
PC central processing unit, while the patient wears small, light
wireless sensor nodes including low power MCUs.
The solution adopted in [38] allows providing a full home
rehabilitation service. In such a solutions, body orientation is
measured by means of a BASN composed by wireless nodes
each equipped with a 9DOF IMU, thus measuring linear ac-
celeration, angular speed, and magnetic field over the three
dimensions and by a gateway in charge of collecting the raw
sensor data and streaming them in real time to a remote server
called the Posture Reconstruction Server (PRS), located in a re-
habilitation facility. The PRS reconstructs the orientation of
each body part of the patient, by first evaluating the orienta-
tion quaternion by means of a Factored Quaternion Algorithm
[39] and then applying a quaternion-based Extended Kalman
Filter [40] to reduce the noise introduced by the accelerome-
ter and magnetometer by complementing their measurements
with the gyroscope ones. Finally, a ROM analysis software, run-
ning on the therapist’s desk, allows reconstructing, delayed or
in real-time, of the patient’s pose in 3D by means of an avatar,
even showing the ROM of the observed joint. In Fig.6, some of
the results obtained are shown for the elbow flexion movement.
As seen in the figure, the results obtained by the system in [38]
showed good agreement with those obtained by the BTS LAM.
The system proposed in [28] has been validated versus the
Tecnobody MJS exoskeleton [17] and the BTS LAM, which is
a marker-based vision system equipped with eight infrared
cameras, when the movement of the shoulder and the elbow
are observed, respectively [41].
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Luca De Vito (devito@
unisannio.it ) (M’10, SM’12)
achieved the master ’s de-
gree cum laude in 2001 in
Software Engineering from
University of Sannio, and
he achieved the PhD in In-
formation Engineering in
2005 from the University of
Sannio. In 2008, he joined
the Department of Engi-
neering of the University of Sannio, as an Assistant Professor
in Electric and Electronic Measurement. At the present time
he is developing his research work in digital processing for
measurement in telecommunications, biomedical instrumen-
tation, and data-converters.
Octavian Adrian Post-
olache (M’99, SM’06)
graduated in Electrical
Engineering in 1992 and re-
ceived the PhD degree in
1999 in Electrical Engineer-
ing from the Gh. Asachi
Technical University of Iasi,
Romania. During 1992-
2000, he worked as an
Assistant Professor and Se-
nior Lecturer the Gh. Asachi Technical University. In 2000, he
worked as a post-doctoral researcher on a fellowship from the
Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation as a princi-
pal researcher of the Instituto de Telecomunicações, In 2001,
he became an Assistant Professor at the Superior School of
Technology/EST-IPS from Setubal, and in January 2012, he
became a Senior Lecturer in School of Architecture and In-
formation Technology/ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon. His fields of
interests are smart sensors for biomedical and environmen-
tal measurement systems, virtual measurement systems, data
sensor fusion, instrumentation networks, signal processing
of biomedical data for health status and instrumental activ-
ity estimation, non-destructive testing and diagnosis based on
eddy currents, computational intelligence with application in
automated measurement systems. He is currently leader of a
national Portuguese project regarding the implementation of
Electronic Health Records for Physiotherapy (EHR-Physio). Electronic Measurement.
Dr. Postolache is author and co-author of ten patents, four He is active in TC-10 of
books, fifteen book chapters, 59 papers in international the IEEE Instrumentation
journals with peer review, and more than 190 papers in pro- and Measurement Soci-
ceedings of international conferences. He is IEEE Senior ety (IMS), a member of the
Member I&M Society, Chair of the IMS TC-13 committee and TC-23, secretary of TC-25, a
the INS Wireless Communication in Measurements, an Asso- member of the IMEKO (In-
ciate Editor of IEEE Sensors Journal, Technical Adviser of IEEE ternational Measurement
EMBS Portugal Chapter, and a member of the International Confederation), TC-13, and
Measurement Confederation. Chapter Chair Liaison of
the IMS. He has published
Sergio Rapuano (M’00) (SM’10) achieved the MS degree more than 150 papers in journals and in the proceedings
in Electronic Engineering with honors and the Ph.D. de- of national and international conferences on the following
gree in Computer Science, Applied Electromagnetism, and subjects: ADC and DAC Modelling and Testing, Digital Sig-
Telecommunications from University of Salerno, Italy. He nal Processing, Distributed Measurement Systems, Medical
joined the Faculty of Engineering of the University of San- Measurements. He received the Outstanding Young Engi-
nio where he is currently Associate Professor of Electric and neer Award in 2007 from the IMS.

38 IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine June 2014