Towards a personalised rehabilitation system for post stroke treatment

摘要

Rehabilitation of post-stroke patients involves long-term care from a large team of professionals and constitutes a major portion of the cost of illness for stroke. Assistive technology that allows patients to perform rehabilitation routines themselves, could minimize costly human intervention and help reduce the impact of stroke on the economy and healthcare system. Due to the limited motor ability of post-stroke patients, rehabilitation technology aimed at stroke patients, must focus on ease of use as well as maintaining interest in the exercise. To this end, this paper presents the design of a system for post-stroke rehabilitation, which addresses both these problems by including novel forms of feedback (light and sound) to encourage and maintain progress, and provide reduced set-up time to emphasise ease of use by using a con-contact distance measuring system. The MGC3130 gesture and tracking controller was used to analyse finger motion and thus allowing the calculation maximum finger extension, speed of finger movement and jerks or wobbles in motion per second from a simple training session consisting of up-down finger motion with fixed number of repetitions for each finger. This paper focusses on this sensor subsystem and reports that finger extension can be calculated with an accuracy of about two millimetres within an extension range of two centimetres, allowing future work to investigate the performance of the whole system.