Development and Evaluation of Wireless Interfaces to Monitor and Control Cycling Exercise During Home Telerehabilitation (original) (raw)

Telemonitoring of Home-Based Biking Exercise: Assessment of Wireless Interfaces

JMIR Biomedical Engineering

Background Telerehabiliation has been shown to have great potential in expanding access to rehabilitation services, enhancing patients’ quality of life, and improving clinical outcomes. Stationary biking exercise can serve as an effective aerobic component of home-based physical rehabilitation programs. Remote monitoring of biking exercise provides necessary safeguards to ensure exercise adherence and safety in patients' homes. The scalability of the current remote monitoring of biking exercise solutions is impeded by the high cost that limits patient access to these services, especially among older adults with chronic health conditions. Objective The aim of this project was to design and test two low-cost wireless interfaces for the telemonitoring of home-based biking exercise. Methods We designed an interactive biking system (iBikE) that comprises a tablet PC and a low-cost bike. Two wireless interfaces to monitor the revolutions per minute (RPM) were built and tested. The fir...

Bluetooth<sup>TM</sup> Enabled Acceleration Tracking (BEAT) mHealth System: Validation and Proof of Concept for Real-Time Monitoring of Physical Activity

E-Health Telecommunication Systems and Networks, 2013

Physical activity is critical to improve the condition of patients with chronic leg and foot ulcers, especially those who are obese and experienced multiple co-morbid conditions. Unfortunately, these individuals are unable to engage in guideline based physical activity (PA) programs. A prototype of Bluetooth TM enabled acceleration tracking (BEAT) mHealth system was developed and manufactured for remote monitoring and stimulation of adherence to PA in deconditioned patients. The system consists of a miniature accelerometer-based sensor, smartphone application, and a network service. Validation testing showed high reliability and reproducibility of the BEAT sensors. Pilot study with human subjects demonstrated high accuracy of the BEAT system in recognition of different exercises and calculating overall outcomes of PA. Taken together, these results indicate that BEAT system could become a valuable tool for real-time monitoring of PA in deconditioned patients.

A Portable Real-Time Monitoring System for Kinesitherapic Hand Rehabilitation Exercises

Proceedings of the International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices, 2012

Rheumatic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic sclerosis, may seriously reduce the quality of life of the patients. Nowadays, their progress can be controlled only through personalised pharmacological treatments. Kinesitherapy can also help in faster movement recovery, also contrasting the disability worsening. This paper presents a portable low-cost system for the real-time quantitative monitoring and evaluation of hand rehabilitation exercises. The system, based on a MSP430 microcontroller central unit, provides a platform for the analysis of fine characteristics hitherto unavailable of 4 exercises required for the hand rehabilitation in rheumatic patients. The system can be controlled, through a Bluetooth connection, by a graphical user interface running on the physician's PC. The first prototypical systems have been developed for experimental outpatient trials.

A Monitoring System of Ankle Rehabilitation For Paralyzed Patients Using Android Aplication

Kinetik: Game Technology, Information System, Computer Network, Computing, Electronics, and Control, 2019

A Monitoring system of ankle rehabilitation for paralyzed patients was successfully designed. The monitoring application on Android smartphone was made app inventor. This application uses bluetooth HC-05 as a data transmission between the ankle therapy aids and smartphone Android. A MPX5050DP sensor is used to determine the muscle condition of the paraplegic to measure the muscle strength scale and control the motor dc speed of ankle rehabilitation hardware. The virtual keys on the application are five instructions of therapeutic movement such as, dorsiflexion (200), plantarflection (450), eversion (100), inversion (100) and patterned of movement. The access time to operate the ankle rehabilitation hardware is 0.8 seconds. This application includes an alarm and a database that can be used as a monitoring system. An alarm menu serves as a reminder for patients to take therapy and database to store data readings of sensors that converted into scale and muscle pressure. A MPX55050DP se...

A Wireless Human Motion Monitoring System for Smart Rehabilitation

Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control, 2016

In this paper, a wireless human motion monitoring system is presented for gait analysis and visual feedback in rehabilitation training. The system consists of several inertial sensors and a pair of smart shoes with pressure sensors. The inertial sensors can capture lower-extremity joint rotations in three dimensions and the smart shoes can measure the force distributions on the two feet during walking. Based on the raw measurement data, gait phases, step lengths, and center of pressure (CoP) are calculated to evaluate the abnormal walking behaviors. User interfaces are developed on both laptops and mobile devices to provide visual feedback to patients and physical therapists. The system has been tested on healthy subjects and then applied in a clinical study with 24 patients. It has been verified that the patients are able to understand the intuitive visual feedback from the system, and similar training performance has been achieved compared to the traditional gait training with phy...

A Smart Assistance Solution for Remotely Monitoring the Orthopaedic Rehabilitation Process Using Wearable Technology: re.flex System

Studies in Informatics and Control

Physical therapy helps patients during their rehabilitation programme after orthopaedic post-operative interventions or in case of musculoskeletal injuries. For a full recovery and a minimisation of the risk of complications, the prescribed in-clinical therapy sessions must be supplemented by independent home training. The purpose of this paper is to present the emerging technologies used for monitoring ortophedic movements and to introduce an innovative telerehabilitation-as-aservice solution, called re.flex, which consists of two IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) motion tracking sensors and a mobile application The therapist makes use of standardised digitised physical exercises that are carefully chosen so as to create, by selection, a custom designed training program that will meet the needs of each patient. The feedback provided by the sensors enables the therapist to a) monitor the patients' compliance with the training program in a transparent manner, b) keep track of the documentation related to the recovery progress through data-collection during in-clinical and in-home exercise-based rehabilitation c) customize the training program. The real-time 3D smartphone animations and the direct visual, audio and haptic feedback from the sensors assist patients in performing the rehabilitation exercises assigned to them. The abovementioned application allows the patients to visualise their injured limb on their smartphone or tablet in an innovative 3D-360° manner, thereby reducing their fear of making mistakes during the recovery process and offering them constant security. The study evaluates the effects of this kind of approach for a group of 30 participants and the results recorded are in favour of the patients recovering with re.flex.

Wheelchair Exercise Monitor Development Platform - An Application for Wireless EMG Sensors

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Sensor Networks, 2018

We present here a novel application for wireless EMG sensors. To combat the physical inactivity which has tended toward cardiovascular disease in individuals who use wheelchairs, we have developed a monitoring system to encourage these individuals to exercise. Wireless sensors are used to monitor kinematic or physiological metrics, which inform the user of their activity levels during exercise and to track progress of their fitness levels over time. In particular, a new completely wireless, wearable EMG sensor (Dynofit, Inc., TX) is integrated with accelerometer and heart rate sensor data to monitor energy expenditure. The sensors communicate with a custom designed mobile app which facilitates exercise at home, with the aim of helping individuals who use a wheelchair to overcome what are commonly hindrances to exercising.

Simplifying Tele-rehabilitation Devices for Their Practical Use in Non-clinical Environments

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

The lack of success of tele-monitoring systems in non-clinical environments is mainly due to the difficulty experienced by common users to deal with them. In particular, for achieving a correct operation, the user is required to take care of a number of annoying details, such as wearing them correctly, putting them in operation, using them in a proper way, and transferring the acquired data to the medical center. In spite of the many technological advances concerning miniaturization, energy consumption reduction, and the availability of mobile devices, many things are still missing to make these technologies simple enough to be really usable by a broad population, and in particular by elderly people. To bridge this gap between users and devices, a smart software layer could automatically manage configuration, calibration, and data transfer without requiring the intervention of a formal caregiver. This paper describes the key features that should be implemented to simplify the needed initial calibration phase of sensing systems and to support the patient with a multimodal feedback throughout the execution of the exercises. A simple mobile application is also presented as a demonstrator of the advantages of the proposed solution.

Wireless Cycling Posture Monitoring Based on Smartphones and Bluetooth Low Energy

This work presents the implementation of a wireless network based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) which enables the integration of multiple sensor nodes into a smartphone-based system in order to monitor the posture of cyclists. The developed posture monitoring system obtains the orientation in space of each body segment in which the sensor nodes are placed and calculates the trunk angle, the knee angle and the angle of inclination of the road. Raw sensor data are collected periodically from accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes and sent via BLE to an Android smartphone, which plays the role of central station and performs the data processing concerning the posture calculation. We describe the development of the hardware and software of the sensor nodes, which are based on the CC2540 BLE system-on-chip, as well as the development of the Android application, and provide experimental results concerning the measurement of the posture of a cyclist in order to validate the proposed system.