An Interactive Fuzzy Inference System for Teletherapy of Older People

Abstract

The progressive aging of the population in developed countries is becoming a problem for healthcare systems, which must invest ever higher sums in caring for their older citizens. One of the most important issues in this area involves the physical and cognitive problems associated with growing old. In order to reduce the effect of these problems, gerontechnology has emerged as one of the most promising alternatives, especially in the field of the telerehabilitation systems developed to date. However, most of these systems do not offer therapists the facilities to design therapies adapted to individual patients. This paper proposes a novel system that supplies this need and enables therapists to create bespoke motor therapies as state diagrams and manage them efficiently in a collaborative setting. The proposed system is equipped with a fuzzy-based decision-making component that therapists can use to control transitioning between states according to variables such as fatigue and performance. Therefore, the system makes it feasible to provide older patients with the treatment they need in their own homes while its effectiveness is controlled by a Fuzzy Inference System.

Collaborative Computer-Assisted Cognitive Rehabilitation System

“…Based in the proposal of Rodríguez (Rodríguez et al, 2016), a Therapy is defined as a set of Activities created to rehabilitate a specific cognitive impairment. Each Activity can be divided into elemental Tasks and each Task is defined as a sequence of Steps.…”

“…the rule that should be applied to determine which activity, task which or step should be the next one after finishing the current one. (Rodríguez et al, 2016). The next component, Rule Authoring is responsible for controlling the rehabilitation process.…”

“…The difficulty and accuracy of each exercise, as well as the next stage of the rehabilitation process, are determined through controlling some specific variables of the exercise and the vital signs of the user, such as those proposed in (Hernandez et al, 2015). As in the previous one, this component used the design describe in the article written by Rodríguez (Rodríguez et al, 2016). The next two components allow designing the specific steps of a particular exercise.…”

Telerobotics-Assisted Platform for Enhancing Interaction with Physical Environments for People Living with Cerebral Palsy

“…Note that, the clinician will be always able to tune these parameters. This is a widely utilized approach in the literature [39,40].…”

“…The reason is that the intensity delivered using the proposed architecture dependents on (a) the musculoskeletal power of the patient, (b) the level of intensity that the therapist/clinician would like to deliver to the individual's hand, and (c) the level of comfort that the individual feels during the trial. Considering feedback from a therapist/clinician is common for neuro-rehabilitation robotic systems, where the therapist/clinician gradually tunes the difficulty level while the patient performs tasks [39,40]. As a result, we suggest to allow the clinician to tune B x and B y based on their understanding of the needs of the individual with CP and considering the individual's comfort level during the interaction.…”