Home self-training: Visual feedback for assisting physical activity for stroke survivors

Abstract

Background and Objective: With the increase in the number of stroke survivors, there is an urgent need for designing appropriate home-based rehabilitation tools to reduce health-care costs. The objective is to empower the rehabilitation of post-stroke patients at the comfort of their homes by supporting them while exercising without the physical presence of the therapist. Methods: A novel low-cost home-based training system is introduced. This system is designed as a composition of two linked applications: one for the therapist and another one for the patient. The therapist prescribes personalized exercises remotely, monitors the home-based training and re-adapts the exercises if required. On the other side, the patient loads the prescribed exercises, trains the prescribed exercise while being guided by color-based visual feedback and gets updates about the exercise performance. To achieve that, our system provides three main functionalities, namely: 1) Feedback proposals guiding a personalized exercise session, 2) Posture monitoring optimizing the effectiveness of the session, 3) Assessment of the quality of the motion. Results: The proposed system is evaluated on 10 healthy participants without any previous contact with the system. To analyze the impact of the feedback proposals, we carried out two different experimental sessions: without and with feedback proposals. The obtained results give preliminary assessments about the interest of using such feedback. Conclusions: Obtained results on 10 healthy participants are promising. This encourages to test the system in a realistic clinical context for the rehabilitation of stroke survivors.

Home-Based Rehabilitation System for Stroke Survivors: A Clinical Evaluation

“…2.1 Overview of the home-based rehabilitation system [1] In this section, we briefly present an overview of the home-based rehabilitation system proposed in [1]. The system is constituted of two linked applications, namely the therapist side and the patient side applications, as illustrated in Figure 1.…”

“…Concretely, this is related to the fact that the clinician cannot control and monitor the home-based training. More specifically, the therapist cannot check: (1) if the patient is exercising; (2) the correctness, frequency and intensity of the exercises while training; and (3) if the patient is risking injuries while training.…”

“…Furthermore, the feedback provided to the patient about the correctness of his/her training is usually difficult to interpret. Recently, in our previous work [1], a novel home-based rehabilitation system based on computer vision tools has been introduced. The main novelty of this system is that it provides continuous communication between the therapist and the patient since it is composed of two applications.…”

“…The feedback proposals of interest are respectively called posture feedback and motion feedback. This system has been initially tested on 10 healthy subjects [1]. Nevertheless, these experiments are not sufficient to assess its clinical utility.…”

“…What this paper adds? The home-based rehabilitation system [1] for stroke survivors represents a recently introduced low-cost system able to: (1) guide the patients while training with real-time color-based feedback; (2) tailor the exercises according to the patient's conditions; (3) ensure the remote follow-up of the training by the therapist. This study contributes to the literature by clinically evaluating the proposed system on 10 stroke survivors.…”