Design and development of arm rehabilitation monitoring device

Abstract

Continuous monitoring of arm rehabilitation exercise is essential in order to provide information of rehabilitation results to be analyzed by physical therapist. This will help them to improve rehabilitation process. Moreover, a portable home-based rehabilitation device which can interact with patients (by providing repetition counters and memory) can help motivate patients to improve daily rehabilitation activity. Some previous studies regarding home-based rehabilitation process have shown improvement in promoting human movement recovery. But existing rehabilitation devices are expensive and need to be supervised by physical therapist, which are complicated to be used at home. Some devices (such as exoskeleton-type devices) are also not so efficient to be used at home due to large size and complex system. In this current work, a portable arm rehabilitation device is designed and developed which can continuously monitor arm movement, The device consists of a flexible bend sensor attached to the elbow which can measure elbow bending angle. Analog signal from the sensor will be conveyed to a PIC18F4520 microcontroller for data processing and logging. LCD display will interact with user by displaying number of repetition. The results of rehabilitation activity also can be retrieved by using a personal computer for further monitoring and analysis. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.