A novel mobile-computing based assistive approach for knee injury telerehabilitation - A preliminary study

Abstract

Patients with knee injuries may not return to their pre-injury level if rehabilitation is not effectively conducted. Ineffective rehabilitation can be largely attributed to the fact that few approaches are available to assist patients in achieving goals of home-based rehabilitation, which plays an increasingly important role in modern rehabilitation protocols. In this study, we propose a novel mobile-computing based approach to assist patients in carrying out the homebased rehabilitation. Specifically, the proposed mobile application can control the inertial sensors in a smartphone to collect rehabilitation activity data. By integrating the knee rehabilitation protocol into the mobile application, it can effectively guide and remind a patient to carry out the protocol in a quality manner. We have conducted experiments by using the mobile application to capture and analyze leg extension data. Experimental results demonstrated that our proposed approach could accurately recognize the leg extension activities and identify the ones completed with poor quality that may result in harmful results. In addition, we have taken the initial step to expand the mobile application to a novel mobile cloud computing (MCC) based telerehabilitation system, in which the mobile subsystem periodically transmits data to the cloud subsystem for storage and analysis. This MCC system will provide a promising solution to assist patients in achieving effective rehabilitation while allowing healthcare providers to provide effective interventions by monitoring the recovery progress.