Enabling Home Rehabilitation with Smartphone-Powered Upper Limb Training

摘要

Rehabilitation training has been proven effective in helping people with different neurological conditions, for example, stroke. In the US, there are over 6.5 million stroke survivors and residual impairment significantly affects their overall quality of life. Traditionally confined to hospitals or rehabilitation clinics and overseen by qualified healthcare professionals, the rehabilitation process is long. Present trend to reduce the length of stay and early discharge limits the potential of a person's recovery. Attempts to increase the intensity of training and mitigate the reduced number of therapy sessions introduced robot-based rehabilitation and virtual reality; however, these approaches faced challenges. Robotics for the most part requires participants to return to the clinic to receive training, and technologies like immersive virtual reality so far were not readily embraced by survivors. This paper introduces an innovative system for upper extremity rehabilitation utilizing a ubiquitous device: the smartphone. The proposed system enables users to engage in rehabilitation through gamification on a compact 30cm x 30cm surface. By combining our software and simple hardware design, the system adeptly tracks user motion and facilitates interaction through the phone screen and camera. Our envisioned approach represents a substantial stride towards achieving affordable home-based rehabilitation using readily available end-user devices.