A network-based monitoring system for rehabilitation

Various techniques have been developed to monitor a patient´s motion for rehabilitation, but many of them are expensive or inadequate for monitoring motions in daily living. In this paper, a network-based monitoring system, which consists of wireless sensor modules, computers at local and remote sites connected via the Internet, and a user-friendly monitoring program, is proposed. The wireless sensor module is an array of lightweight Arduino-powered inertia measurement units (IMUs) with wireless communication powered by the ZigBee protocol. The wireless sensor modules measure kinematic information of a human body, and the measured data is analyzed at the local and host computers which are connected via the Internet. For easy observation and monitoring, a 3D human model is animated in both computers. In order to verify the performance of the proposed system, gait motions are monitored and analyzed by the proposed system with a shoe-type ground reaction force measurement system. The experimental results show that the proposed monitoring system can be used as a method to cheaply and noninvasively provide kinematic information conducive towards rehabilitation for patients, even without the presence of a trained specialist.