Progress Monitoring in Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation by Using Muscle Activation and Hand Speed

Abstract

Nowadays, Virtual Reality (VR) technology is commonly used in the rehabilitation to increase the motivation of the stroke patients do the exercises, however, very few researches to monitor the rehabilitation progress has reported. VR based rehabilitation is interesting because could motivate stroke patients in their long-term rehabilitation process. This research is to evaluate the progress monitoring of the subject after conducting three sessions of rehabilitation exercise. Five male and female healthy subjects were selected to do the rehabilitation game. Three VR games are designed for the subject to perform three different movement sequences. The selected upper limb characteristics are muscle activation and hand speed. An Electromyography (EMG) is used to measure the muscle activation through an electrical activity of the muscle, while a Kinect sensor is used to measure the hand speed. The experimental results show that the proposed upper limb characteristics are able to be used for monitoring progress in the rehabilitation.