A programmable device to guide rehabilitation patients: Design, testing and data collection

Physical therapy and rehabilitation therapy aim to support patients in dealing with the consequences of their and physical impairments in daily activities. The recent developments in biomedical sensors combined with the wireless network infrastructure will deeply transform healthcare systems and help physicians in designing better and more precise therapies with faster feedback from patients in terms of health-related measured data. Furthermore, these new systems will enable distributed healthcare services for remote patients who may live far away from health structures or who may have movement impairment. Efficiently monitoring or acquiring data from a large number of patients will cause improvements during rehabilitation and help in early diagnoses together with reducing the costs in the healthcare system with more effective prevention. We present a programmable rehabilitation device which can be useful to evaluate patients' performances in a set of physiotherapy exercises designed to evaluate subjects by neurophysiological impairments which slow down some types of movements. The tool is able to support the definition of rehabilitation exercises involving upper limbs and hands. The presented device assesses the responsiveness and movement capacity of patients undergoing physiotherapy aiming to test and measure the mobility, strength and functional ability of the hand during prone supination exercises.