Kinect-Assisted Performance-Sensitive Upper Limb Exercise Platform for Post-stroke Survivors

Abstract

One's ability to use upper limbs is critical for performing activities of daily living necessary for enjoying quality community life. However, after stroke, such abilities becomes adversely affected and it often deprives one of their capability to perform tasks that need coordinated movement in the upper limbs. To address issues with upper limb dysfunction, patients typically undergo rehabilitative exercises. Given the high patient to doctor ratio particularly in developing countries like India, conventional rehabilitation with patients undergoing exercises under one-on-one therapist's supervision often becomes a challenge. Thus, investigators are exploring technology such as computer-based platforms coupled with cameras that can alleviate the need for the continuous presence of a therapist and can offer a powerful complementary tool in the hands of the clinicians. Such marker-based imaging systems used for rehabilitation can offer real-time processing and high accuracy of data. However, these systems often require dedicated lab space and high set-up time. Often this is very expensive and suffers from portability issues. Investigators have been exploring marker-less imaging techniques e.g., Kinect integrated computer-based graphical user interfaces in stroke-rehabilitation such as tracking one's limb movement during rehabilitation. In our present study, we have developed a Kinect-assisted computer-based system that offered Human Computer Interaction (HCI) tasks of varying challenge levels. Execution of the tasks required one to use reaching and coordination skills of the upper limbs. Also, the system was Performance-sensitive i.e., adaptive to the individualized residual movement ability of one's upper limb quantified in terms of task performance score. We tested for the usability of our system by exposing 15 healthy participants to our system. Subsequently, seven post-stroke patients interacted with our system over a few sessions spread over 2 weeks. Also, we studied patient's mean tonic activity corresponding to the HCI tasks as a possible indicator of one's post-stroke functional recovery suggesting its potential of our system to serve as a rehabilitation platform. Our results indicate the potential of such systems toward the improvement of task performance capability of post-stroke patients with possibilities of upper limb movement rehabilitation.

A Solution for the Remote Care of Frail Elderly Individuals via Exergames

“…There are several solutions in the context of exergames for clinical practice, for example, applications for poststroke [ 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ] and Parkinson’s rehabilitation [ 41 , 42 ], and with particular emphasis on physical activity [ 43 ].…”

Augmented Reality For Stroke Rehabilitation During COVID-19

“…Later on, many systems have been developed and reported with encouraging results for stroke recovery. The most recent work include the AR-augmented wheelchairs by Daniel et al in 2020 [40], the Kinect-based training by Adyasha et al [37] and Aušra et al [38] in 2019. In Figure 1, we have summarized the repre-sentative AR stroke rehabilitation studies/systems in recent 10 years.…”

“…We can see that a diverse range of studies/systems have been conducted/built. Some are for the upper extremity including those for arms [10,12,13,16,17,20,21,23,25,27,30,[37][38][39], hands/fingers [10, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 25-28, 30-33, 38], and shoulders [10-14, 16, 20-23, 27, 29, 30, 35, 38, 39], while the others are on the lower extremity including those for ankles [18,19,36], gait [15,19,24,36], balance [15,19,23,24,36], and postural [19,23,24]. However, most of these studies are conducted in laboratory setting and thus are less feasible in real clinical scenarios [1] .…”

A Robust and Scalable Attention Guided Deep Learning Framework for Movement Quality Assessment

“…Another issue with the home-based rehabilitation program is the lack of corrective feedback on movement quality and correctness. Some of the technological solutions available to the patient undergoing home-based rehabilitation are the robotic assistive systems [6], virtual reality and gaming interfaces [7], and Kinect based assistance [8].…”