Designing Intuitive Web Solutions for Monitoring Patients’ Rehabilitation at Home

Abstract

This paper describes the design of web-based remote monitoring interfaces aimed at supporting therapists and caregivers in supervising motor-cognitive rehabilitation plans of care to be performed by patients at home. This work was part of a three years' research project where game-based environments for upper body motor rehabilitation of post-stroke patients were developed in collaboration with two main rehabilitation centers in Italy and Austria, for a subsequent deployment at patients' homes. The paper will specifically focus on describing the iterative design of the home rehabilitation features for clinicians over the first two years of the project to enable the delivery and monitoring of more personalized, engaging plans of care for home therapy by rehabilitation centers and services.

Gamified In-Home Rehabilitation for Stroke Survivors: Analytical Review

“…These data are used to search for a correlation between kinematic performance and scores in standard clinical rating scales. If an increase in kinematic performance and better scores in the clinical rate scales are found, then the result of the evaluation states that the system helps in the rehabilitation process, as described in [19,26,27,32,33,38,[49][50][51]. In order to apply these standard clinical test, the presence of the therapist is required, this represents the disadvantage of these systems.…”

“…Some works (14% of total reviewed works) included in-home systems, but the patient's data must be retrieved at given intervals of time [28,32,33,48,49]. More advanced systems (29% of total works) allow sending the patient's data remotely via internet [18,30,31,38,[50][51][52][53][54][55]. Even when these gamified systems were developed for in-home use, 57% of them were not tested at in-home conditions.…”

“…The research works concerned only by the gross movement of the patient's arms and hand's positioning, which mobility is basic for achieving the first steps of the patient's independence are: [19, 26, 28, 34, 38, 41-44, 47, 49, 52, 54, 55] (50% of total works). After achieving the gross movement of arms, the next priority is to achieve finer daily life task related exercises such as hand closing/opening [18, 29-31, 45, 50, 51] (14% of total works), pinching, grasping and moving objects [9,25,27,29,32,33,36,46,48,50,51,53] (36% of total works).…”

“…They range from systems that are used in the hospital with the therapist next to the patient, to full in-home systems with allowing the therapist to have constant remote-video communication with the patient. Semi-supervised systems (18% of total works) range from at-hospital systems that need minimal therapist intervention, to in-home systems that allow opening a communication channel between the therapist and the patient [30,31,38,[49][50][51][52].…”

“…Most of the reviewed works implemented only one game (54% of total works) in order to prove the concept developed in their work. In some cases they have two games [27,30,31,54] (10% of total works), three games [19,25,26,28,46,53] (21% of total works), four games [34] (4% of total works), five games [50,51] (4% of total works), and even nine games [18,29] (7% of total works). Alankus et al [29], tested nine games to explore the space of games that can be used for stroke rehabilitation systems.…”