A Wearable Rehabilitation System to Assist Partially Hand Paralyzed Patients in Repetitive Exercises*

Abstract

The main purpose of the paper is development, implementation, and testing of a low cost portable system to assist partially paralyzed patients in their hand rehabilitation after strokes or some injures. Rehabilitation includes time consuming and repetitive exercises which are costly and demotivating as well as the requirements of clinic attending and direct supervision of physiotherapist. In this work, the system consists of a graphical user interface (GUI) on a smartphone screen to instruct and motivate the patients to do their exercises by themselves. Through the GUI, the patients are instructed to do a sequence of exercises step by step, and the system measures the electrical activities (electromyographic signals EMG) of the user’s forearm muscles by Myo armband. Depending on database, the system can tell whether the patients have done correct movements or not. If a correct movement is detected, the system will inform the user through the GUI and move to the next exercise. For preliminary results, the system was extensively tested on a healthy person.