A programmable sanding box rehabilitation and evaluation system

We aim to develop a novel and enhanced device which can not only help patients to undergo rehabilitation for upper limb impairments, but also help medical staff to better monitor the details of the rehabilitation training. With this information, medical staff can create much more appropriate therapy programs for patients with upper limb functional impairment. The proposed system is mainly comprised of five parts: a sanding box, a smooth exercise table, an operation platform, a system server and a mobile monitoring device. Those parts are integrated together through wireless communication to provide enhanced functional hand rehabilitation with moving distance detection, moving velocity calculation, moving kinetic energy computation, number of training times computation, weight load measurement and training message generation. In addition, a remote login mechanism allows medical staff to monitor the patient´s training and evaluate their treatment progress. An emergency notification system is also embedded so that patients can receive immediate help from medical staff or from their families when needed. The experimental results show that the system can not only reduce the boring and monotonous nature of training, but also improve the efficiency of treatment. Furthermore, medical staff can have a complete training record to analyze training effectiveness so that they can adjust and improve their treatment. Thus better rehabilitation for hand impairment can be achieved.