Artificial hip and knee replacements require quite a bit of physical therapy post surgery to achieve the desired results. In many places and for many people, a rehab clinic may be too far away or time too short to receive regular therapy. At home exercises, even using virtual coaches, are helpful but they probably can’t be as motivating or effective as a real therapist. At the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems in Germany, researchers have built a system that allows therapists to effectively become virtual coaches while being able to assess their patients and how they perform various exercises.
The ReMove-It project is using the MeineReha system developed at the institute, which lets a therapist record themselves doing different exercises, following which these videos become part of a telemedicine program for the patient to follow. The patient performs the exercises along with the pre-recorded therapist videos. A Kinect, a 3D camera which was recently discontinued by Microsoft, is used to track the patient’s body and provide the therapist a way to review the performance.
The therapist can provide guidance, record new exercises, and guide the rehab toward new goals. The fact that there’s no limitation to the exercises and that they can be tailored directly to each patient is an important aspect of this system that we haven’t seen in similar systems.
The researchers hope that the product will become properly commercialized and available as a product for rehab facilities to buy by next year.
Link: MeineReha…
Via: Fraunhofer…