Smart rehab assistant

Abstract

Neuromuscular and neurological diseases are serious financial burden to the health service as well as to society, since patients of the diseases need a plenty of rehabilitation services and very often have lost their working abilities. Because of boredom and slow progress, some patients even give up the rehabilitation exercises before they relearn the skills for daily life. This will further waste the government resources in health service. So, an interesting and efficient rehabilitation system is strongly needed and recommended. Numerous rehabilitation systems for this type of patients have been developed. Some of them employ interactive machines and some of them virtual reality technology. One common feature of existing VR rehabilitation systems is that they can provide feedback giving by machines, and some of them can provide interesting and purposeful activities. However, a number of them do not provide whole body rehabilitation exercises which are not suitable for coordinate exercises. Also a number of them require the patients to wear motion sensors or special clothes which are not convenient to the patients with difficulties in movement. In this project, I have designed a system, Smart Rehab Assistant (SRA) which tackles some of these problems. The system aims to develop help patients to do coordination exercises and hand exercises by using virtual reality technology, infrared cameras and Wii Remote ™ . SRA can track the whole body movement, as well as the fine movements of the patient’s hands, which are translated into data that in turn can be monitored by the system while the patient is involved in some coordination exercises especially involving the hand movement. SRA also provides attractive and meaningful activities to motivate the patients to continue their required rehabilitation exercises. In addition, participants in SRA do not need to wear any sensors or special clothes. This will be more user-friendly to the participants. SRA is suitable for elder patients, aged 60-90, with neuromuscular or neurological disease (e.g. stroke, senile dementia (老人痴呆), Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer’s Disease (阿耳滋海默氏病 / 初期癡呆症狀), Parkinson’s Disease (帕金森氏病)), with chronic disease or any other disease which need to train the body coordination.