An Interactive Training System Design for Ankle Rehabilitation

Abstract

Ankle sprain is a common trauma, most patients can recover by non-surgical treatments. However, prolonged immobilization of ankle sprains is a common treatment error. After ankle sprain, patients should keep rehabilitation exercises to recover to the same level as before. There are 3 stages of ankle rehabilitation training process. This paper focuses on the second stage - proprioceptive training of intermediate functional rehabilitation. The normal training exercise of the second stage is balance training, bilateral and unilateral stance on different surfaces, which has been verified effective by large experimental data. Although balance training is simple and convenient, people can hardly complete the required amount of training because of the monotonous process. Therefore, although the medical research in ankle rehabilitation is well developed, the ankle rehabilitation training is not effective nor efficient enough. This paper shows a way to improve the effects and experiences of ankle rehabilitation process through interactive design and gamification. The interactive training system consists of 2 parts, the multi-touch pressure sensor and the user interface. The sensor can acquire the data of users’ feet pressure distribution, which can be used to judge if the user is doing the proper training action. The user interface can give users instant feedback by game elements. Users can control the movement of the game subject by feet force changes (The pressure data are processed to apply to the game control module) to win the awards and avoid the obstacles. Each time the users succeed a game, they complete a training task at the same time. A user test was implemented for the interactive training system. According to the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction result by questionnaires, the users showed high satisfaction of the training process and outcome.