Biofeedback System Architectures

Abstract

Biofeedback systems have a great diversity of possible applications, thus they must have flexible system architecture. This chapter presents the properties of the biofeedback system and their constraints. The most important space, time, and computation constraints are studied in detail, while some other less important constraints are only mentioned or discussed briefly. While these constraints define the base architecture of the system, its details are defined by its properties, such as structure, functionality, and physical extent . In the terms of structure, compact and distributed systems are defined; in the terms of functionality, user, instructor, and cloud system types are discussed; in the terms of physical extent, personal, confined, and open space systems are studied. The presented user, instructor, and cloud biofeedback system architectures are based on the above constraints and properties. The chapter is concluded with the classification and comparison section, which presents a classification graph and comparison of the architectures. Advantages and disadvantages for each of the presented biofeedback system architectures are given accompanied with some possible examples and scenarios of their use.