A software tool to acquire, synchronise and playback multimedia data: an application in kinesiology

Assessing the physical condition of the human body frequently requires evaluating different tests performed by different devices. This information has to be analysed simultaneously to derive conclusions, and so a temporal relationship must be established between the data sources. In this paper, synchronisation of the sources of information is achieved by synchronising the clocks of computers connected in a Local Area Network. A clock synchronisation protocol is used and a global time is stamped in each information data flow. During analysis, the time-stamp is used to playback the data in a synchronised way. The proposed system is valid for any medical application in which data synchronisation is needed. However, it has initially been used in a distributed medical environment for analysing electrical muscular activity and lumbar movement. The dual aim is to detect injuries and plan training sessions for athletes. It was specifically used to analyse data generated by: electromyographs; lumbar equipment, and images generated by video cameras. The simple operation of the application and the precision of the synchronisation protocol enabled several interesting medical conclusions to be made. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.