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

Assessing the physical condition of the human body frequently requires eval uating different tests performed by different devices. This information has to be analysed simultaneously to derive conclusions, and so a temporal rel ationship must be established between the data sources. In this paper, sync hronisation of the sources of information is achieved by synchronising the clocks of computers connected in a Local Area Network. A clock synchronisat ion 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 syn chronised way. The proposed system is valid for any medical application in which data synchronisation is needed. However, it has initially been used i n a distributed medical environment for analysing electrical muscular activ ity and lumbar movement. The dual aim is to detect injuries and plan traini ng sessions for athletes. It was specifically used to analyse data generate d by: electromyographs; lumbar equipment, and images generated by video cam eras. The simple operation of the application and the precision of the sync hronisation protocol enabled several interesting medical conclusions to be made. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.