Physio@Home

Physio@Home – My Rehabilitation Suite at Home

 

Description:

Physiotherapy is an effective treatment prescription in various clinical scenarios, for example, to minimize musculoskeletal pain, recover the range of motion after joint surgery, recover function and independence after stroke or other neurological damage, improve posture, among others. A high number of sessions and the compliance with the correct repetition of the exercises proposed, requiring focus and motivation, are crucial to the success of this kind of interventions.

However, the number of sessions is usually low as compared with the potential of recovery of the patient, because of time and cost limitations. It is frequently recommended to the patient to continue practicing some exercises at home, which is difficult to accomplish due to lack of motivation and feedback during the execution of the exercises.

The current project aims to develop a solution to extend physiotherapy programs to people’s homes as a complement to the sessions performed at the clinics. The solution proposed is based on smartphones or tablets and wearables containing electromyography (EMG) and inertial sensors that will be used to track the execution of the movements and give biofeedback to the user. The smartphone or tablet will display intuitive games that will guide the user through the execution of the exercises and provide biofeedback. The performance metrics collected about the exercises during the games will be stored and made available to the physiotherapist through a web portal.

The gamification of rehabilitation exercises and their deployment in ubiquitous and pervasive devices, such as smartphones or tablets in combination with wearables for movement monitoring, will enable a more engaging complement to physiotherapy sessions and ensure the correct execution of the exercises at home.

 

Outcome:

A rehabilitation suite that can be taken home in order to improve the motivation and adherence to complementary sessions of physiotherapy at home by using exercise interactive video games (exergames) and wearables.

This project intends to improve the efficiency and cost-efficacy of physiotherapy and rehabilitation processes by allowing to complement the sessions at the clinics with the execution of some exercises at home.

The project will result in a new product for PLUX, extending their Physioplux system that is currently only used at clinical facilities to the user’s home.

 

Consult the project's Spec Sheet here:

English | Portuguese

 

Consortium:

PLUX – Wireless Biosignals SA | Fraunhofer Portugal   

 

Co-funded by:

For any additional information, please contact us using the inquiries form.