Developemnt of the Infrastructure for tele-rehabilitation

In a recent article in Rehabilitation Engineering, Dr Colombo and his team from Rehabilitation Institute Veruno and Pavia Italy discuss the development of systems architecture for robot aided tele-rehabilitation http://bit.ly/gZ2AFQ

The group note that to date, previous tele-rehabilitation studies have NOT studied a modular combination of rehabilitation devices that can be used by patients with a wide range of different ages, education, technology background and level of movement ability. Because patient motivation is an important factor in rehabilitation outcome a tele-rehabiliation system needs to increases patient satisfaction and motivation above or equal to that gained with traditional clinic based rehabilitation services. In addition the system needs to increase intensity of patient exercise performance and reduce health care costs. They point out that the technology has to be very user friendly so that the patient and therapist will concentrate on the task and not on the technology. Tele-rehabilitation holds the promise of allowing for improved continuity of care, increased exercise time and continuity of treatment with a reduction in the rehabilitation resources required. Interaction between the therapist and the patient can be through real time concurrent monitoring of the patient doing the virtual rehabilitation task with the patient and therapist being online at the same time during the session. Alternatively, intermittent online therapy consists of the therapist going online to update the exercise task and monitor the patient’s adherence to exercise regimen.

The HandTutor and ArmTutor system consists of a comfortable ergonomic glove and elbow brace with 3D shoulder position feedback. The patient wears the HandTutor and ArmTutor and the system allows the patient to practice multi-joint virtual functional tasks. The tasks are formulated so that they mimic ADL tasks like hair brushing, hand reaching and grasping. Continuous and intermittent online therapy is possible with the HandTutor system as the virtual functional tasks motivate the patient to practice on their own and either the patient or the therapist updating the task. Additionally evaluations on the patient’s quality, accuracy, speed of movement are incorporated into the HandTutor system allowing the therapist to quantitatively monitor the patient’s progress.