Global Tele Rehabilitation System

Microsoft Kinect in a tele rehabilitation system for post stroke patients 

GTRS (Global Tele Rehabilitation System) is a project meant to develop a tele rehabilitation platform in order to support tele rehabilitation exercises of post stroke patients at home. Stroke is the most important cause of disability and the second cause of dementia in Spain. The rehabilitation has to be uninterrupted and also has to be as often as possible. From this need comes the opportunity to use ICT resources in order to improve some aspects of the rehabilitation.

Due to the high number of patients that need rehabilitation after suffering a stroke, it’s not possible to provide a long rehabilitation to all of them. As a consequence of this, patients only receive the adequate rehabilitation during a few months. The stroke rehabilitation has two phases: during the first one the patient remains in the hospital and does rehabilitation with the hospital professionals regularly, during the second one the patient does the rehabilitation at home. In most cases, this rehabilitation is not taken seriously enough and the visits with the rehabilitation doctors are less frequent that it would be desired. This fact provokes that so many patients have to go back to the hospital after some time because of related problems caused by insufficient rehabilitation at home after the stroke.

One of the main goals is to track the rehabilitation process and give continuity to all the process until the patient is completely recovered. The system tracks the patient articulations while they are doing rehabilitation exercises and gives feedback to both patient and doctor. In order to be able to track the exercise, the platform includes a Microsoft Kinect responsible of picking all the articulation data and giving it as an input to a movement detection algorithm. The platform includes also a touch screen computer that make easier to the patient the interaction with the platform and a 3G dongle that provide a good connectivity with the servers of the system. The second module of the platform is a web application that supports access from patients and doctors. Patients can see their remaining exercises of the rehabilitation process, their evolution and their dates with doctors from the reference hospital. On the other side, the doctors can plan the dates and exercises of their patients as well as call them using a videoconference tool included in the platform.

The project is still in its development phase, the collaborator entities in this project are i2Cat Foundation, Vodafone Spain Foundation and Vall d’Hebron Research Institute.