A portable and cost-effective upper extremity rehabilitation system for individuals with upper limb motor deficits

Abstract

Long-term rehabilitation opportunities are critical for millions of individuals with chronic upper limb motor deficits striving to improve their motor performance through self-managed rehabilitation programs. However, there is minimal professional support of rehabilitation across the lifespan. In this paper, we introduce an upper extremity rehabilitation system, the Quality of Movement Feedback-Oriented Measurement System (QM-FOrMS), by integrating cost-effective portable sensors and clinically verified motion quality analysis towards individuals with upper limb motor deficits. Specifically, QM-FOrMS is comprised of an eTextile pressure sensitive mat, named Smart Mat, a sensory can, named Smart Can, and a mobile device. A personalizable and adaptive upper limb rehabilitation program is developed, including both unilateral and bilateral functional activities which can be selected from a list or custom designed to further tailor the program to the individual. Quantitative evaluation of the motor performance from the QM-FOrMS is derived from fine-grained kinematic measurements. We ran a pilot study with three groups, including five baseline subjects (i.e., healthy young adults), six older adults and four individuals with movement impairment. The experimental results show that QM-FOrMS can provide the detailed feature during the unattended rehabilitation exercise, and proposed metrics can distinguish the evaluation results across group.