Page 160 - ITU Kaleidoscope 2016

In our proposed tele-rehabilitation system, a call center They express the lean of the body by an image of the
operator guides patients instead of a physiotherapist. Hence, balance scale and show arrows to correct a patient’s posture
our system has supervising functions for a physiotherapist to as shown in Figure 3.
coach a call center operator like supervising functions in There are also many video games for rehabilitation that
existing voice call center. use Microsoft KINECT [9][10][11]. These contents can
After describing related works in Section 2, we
introduce outlines and functions of TRS in Section 3. measure and record performance of a virtual game and show
it to a patient to motivate him or her to continue
Implementation is described in Section 4. We consider effect
for shortage of physiotherapist and problems in Section 5. rehabilitation.
The key points in this paper are summarized in Section 6.
3. CONCEPT OF TRS WITH VIDEO CALL CENTER
2. RELATED WORK
Our TRS is based on the following ideas:
In this section, we introduce existing remote
rehabilitaion systems and Microsoft KINECT usage  Practical data that shows the patients getting better
will effectively encourage them to continue
applications adopted in rehabilitation.
rehabilitation, more than simply giving them vague
2.1 Remote rehabilitation information such as “you are a little better than
yesterday”.
Traditionally, tele-rehabilitation has been administered  Hearing a person’s voice is likely to cheer patients
between a therapist and a patient through a video up.
conference system or video phones, without using Additionally, we plan to employee non-professionals as
measuring and monitoring applications [4]. In accordance operators who work in their home instead of physio-
with the evolution of remote monitoring applications, therapists to hold down operation costs and compensate for
robotics and virtual reality technologies have been combined a shortage of physiotherapists.
with video conference systems. Holden et al. applied virtual We introduce roles of a physiotherapist and operator,
reality technologies to their tele-rehabilitation system [5]. and necessary functions to realize above concepts.
Carignan reported a rehabilitation system for which robotics
was applied including remote rehabilitation [6]. Bradley et al. 3.1. Roles of a physiotherapist and operator
reported investigations of the design, control and
implementation of a form of the intelligent exoskeleton,
web-based strategies and robotics for remote rehabilitation Roles of a physiotherapist are as follows:
[7]. In this research, therapists directly guide or coach  Teaching operators how to guide patients through
patients through their systems. Therefore, existing tele- rehabilitation and supervising the operators.
rehabilitation systems can shorten convey time for a visiting  Deciding and changing therapy programs on the
therapist. However, these systems are insufficient to make basis of diagnostics data and measured data.
up for the shortage of therapists. Roles of an operator are as follows:

2.2. Therapy contents adopted Microsoft KINET to  Monitoring motions of a patient and measuring
rehabilitation joint angles by the measuring applications.
 Coaching a patient in how to move his or her body
Garrido et al. applied Microsoft KINECT rehabilitations using the administration tools and therapy contents
for patients who have trouble with their sense of balance on the basis of therapy programs.
with cerebrovascular disease [8].
3.2. Providing features

As shown in Figure 4, this system comprises following
components;
 Administration tools: An operator uses these tools
to guide patients.
 Measuring tools: An operator uses these tools to
measure conditions of a patient including joint
angles. Kinds of measuring tool that are kind of
sensors are easily added to the TRS as necessary.
Figure 3. Screen shot of the rehabilitation system for  Supervising tools: A physiotherapist uses these
balance disorder patients described in [8] tools to coach operators. A physiotherapist
accesses the patient database to check measured

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