An architecture for creating mobile assistive products: a case study on posture monitoring of people with motor disability

Abstract

We describe a software architecture for supporting the construction of mobile assistive products and for monitoring people at home by health professionals and carers. Unlike studies that rely on building assistive applications and monitoring infrastructures based on complex environments and external devices, our approach relies on designing and implementing assistive products offered on mobile devices. The demand for implementing our architecture came from brainstorm sessions with occupational therapists who work with rehabilitation of people with motor disabilities. The architecture follows a client-server model with two clients: the mobile module for designing and implementing the assistive products, and the Web module used to monitor the users remotely. The mobile module was evaluated through experiments with 7 users, who used a smartphone application for monitoring the posture of stroke survivors. Despite the need for further comprehensive evaluations though more complete case studies, the results indicate the suitability of the architecture for posture monitoring of people with motor disability. Moreover, it provides a straightforward way to modify and extend mobile solutions that the uses built-in hardware of current mobile devices, such as sensors, the microphone and the camera, in order to create solutions that rely on non-usual interaction modalities.