A Personalized Exercise Trainer for Elderly

Abstract

Abstract. Regular and moderate physical activity practice provides many physiological benefits. It reduces the risk of disease outcomes and is the basis for proper rehabilitation after a severe disease. Aerobic activity and strength exercises are strongly recommended in order to maintain autonomy with ageing. Balanced activity of both types is important, especially to the elderly population. Several methods have been proposed to monitor aerobic activities. However, no appropriate method is available for controlling more complex parameters of strength exercises. Within this context, the present article introduces a personalized, home-based strength exercise trainer designed for the elderly. The system guides a user at home through a personalized exercise program. Using a network of wearable sensors the user's motions are captured. These are evaluated by comparing them to prescribed exercises, taking both exercise load and technique into account. Moreover, the evaluation results are immediately translated into appropriate feedback to the user in order to assist the correct exercise execution. Besides the direct feedback, a major novelty of the system is its generic personalization by means of a supervised teach-in phase, where the program is performed once under supervision of a physical activity specialist. This teach-in phase allows the system to record and learn the correct execution of exercises for the individual user and to provide personalized monitoring. The user-driven design process, the system development and its underlying activity monitoring methodology are described. Moreover, technical evaluation results as well as results concerning the usability of the system for ageing people are presented. The latter has been assessed in a clinical study with thirty participants of 60 years or older, some of them showing usual diseases or functional limitations observed in elderly population.

Literature review on wearable systems in upper extremity rehabilitation

“…Based on the abstracts we selected papers discussing rehabilitation technologies (at home or the clinic) and excluded papers discussing prevention, prosthetics, coaching and information/educational applications for smartphones that do not have a direct use during rehabilitation, as well as robotic system. Eventually 19 papers were selected [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. They are categorized as follows: a) Wearable posture & movement training systems that have potential in rehabilitation applications by monitoring posture and movements;…”

“…A large number of experimental systems and even some commercial products have been developed for upper extremity training, supporting rehabilitation for several patient groups: stroke, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy patients, etc. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] reflecting the large need for effective upper extremity rehabilitation technologies.…”

Information Technology for Active Ageing: A Review of Theory and Practice

“…In the same line, also affecting positively the lifestyle determinant, and leveraging the use of sensors, Steffen et al [158] designed an application to suggest physical exercises and monitor the user activity through a wearable sensor, thereby coaching the user throughout the exercises. Other works have used robots as trainers, which is the case of "robot exercise instructor" [53], a mobile robot that coaches the user to perform seated exercises to improve physical strength.…”

The New Digital Natives

“…On the other hand, the quality of movement, applied to finish a task in commercial games, can be frequently ignored, as the games tend to be more focused on concluding a task without focusing on the quality of the movement. Similarly, [302] sketchs an effective system for supporting physical activities, especially in home environments.…”