A Case Study on the Design and Implementation of a Platform for Hand Rehabilitation

Abstract

Rehabilitation aids help people with temporal or permanent disabilities during the rehabilitation process. However, these solutions are usually expensive and, consequently, inaccessible outside of professional medical institutions. Rapid advances in software development, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and additive manufacturing open up a way to affordable rehabilitation solutions, even to the general population. Imagine a rehabilitation aid constructed from accessible software and hardware with local production. Many obstacles exist to using such technology, starting with the development of unified software for custom-made devices. In this paper, we address open issues in designing rehabilitation aids by proposing an extensive rehabilitation platform. To demonstrate our concept, we developed a unique platform, RehabHand. The main idea is to use domain-specific language and code generation techniques to enable loosely coupled software and hardware solutions. The main advantage of such separation is support for modular and a higher abstraction level by enabling therapists to write rehabilitation exercises in natural, domain-specific terminology and share them with patients. The same platform provides a hardware-independent part that facilitates the integration of new rehabilitation devices. Experience in implementing RehabHand with three different rehabilitation devices confirms that such rehabilitation technology can be developed, and shows that implementing a hardware-independent rehabilitation platform might not be as challenging as expected.

Robot-Assisted Rehabilitation Architecture Supported by a Distributed Data Acquisition System

“…The work in [ 36 ] further proposes the dissemination of rehabilitation technologies to the general public by developing a low-cost hand rehabilitation device based on Arduino. In this way, the design of a unified platform with a relatively simple architecture allows for the connection of different devices.…”

“…According to an analysis of the previously mentioned articles, the GUI is implemented in all of the proposed architecture except for [ 18 , 19 , 35 ]; the EMG sensor is not implemented in the majority of the discussed papers [ 18 , 19 , 30 , 31 , 34 , 36 , 37 ]. Furthermore, there is a discrepancy between the rehabilitation strategies, none of the systems presented are able to offer both the possibility to choose between default exercises and the possibility to create exercises and adapt, i.e., either to follow a pre-defined rehabilitation pathway or to create an exercise that the robot will reproduce.…”

Developing Microservice-Based Applications Using the Silvera Domain-Specific Language

“…This allows the language to be very expressive for problems that fall in the domain. DSLs foster the building of a community of domain experts who speak the same language [33]. DSLs whose domain, abstractions, and notations are closely aligned with how domain experts (i.e., non-programmers) express themselves allow domain experts to easily read and often write program code since it is not cluttered with irrelevant implementation details [12].…”

PyFlies: A Domain-Specific Language for Designing Experiments in Psychology

“…This restriction makes DSLs more expressive and concise [12]. Furthermore, the DSL approach fosters the building of a community of domain experts who speak the same language [21].…”

“…Kosar et al [21] present a unique hand rehabilitation platform RehabHand based on DSL and code generation techniques. The language uses a simple textual syntax and enables therapists to write rehabilitation exercises in natural, domain-specific terminology and share them with patients.…”