Abstract
Patient motivation is an important factor to consider when developing rehabilitation programs. Here, we explore the effectiveness of active participation in web-based citizen science activities as a means of increasing participant engagement in rehabilitation exercises, through the use of a low-cost haptic joystick interfaced with a laptop computer. Using the joystick, patients navigate a virtual environment representing the site of a citizen science project situated in a polluted canal. Participants are tasked with following a path on a laptop screen representing the canal. The experiment consists of two conditions: in one condition, a citizen science component where participants classify images from the canal is included; and in the other, the citizen science component is absent. Both conditions are tested on a group of young patients undergoing rehabilitation treatments and a group of healthy subjects. A survey administered at the end of both tasks reveals that participants prefer performing the scientific task, and are more likely to choose to repeat it, even at the cost of increasing the time of their rehabilitation exercise. Furthermore, performance indices based on data collected from the joystick indicate significant differences in the trajectories created by patients and healthy subjects, suggesting that the low-cost device can be used in a rehabilitation setting for gauging patient recovery.
Highlights
Rehabilitation is the structured process undertaken toward adapting to unforeseen changes resulting from trauma or disease [1]
The setup allows for administering repetitive exercises often characteristic of rehabilitation treatments [3], while capturing sensor data sufficient for constructing a set of performance metrics that can be used for rehabilitation assessment [18, 52, 53]
This study indicates that citizen science is an effective means to engage patients in rehabilitation exercises
Summary
Rehabilitation is the structured process undertaken toward adapting to unforeseen changes resulting from trauma or disease [1]. For individuals with severe motor dysfunction, it is a necessary step to recover self-reliance [2] In this context, repetitive exercises have been shown to offer effective rehabilitation treatments in stroke patients [3,4,5,6,7], but often at the cost of a large time-commitment from both the physical therapist and patient. By shifting to robotics-based treatments, physical therapists may be able to simultaneously treat a greater number of patients and obtain performance measures from the data gathered through the robotic device’s sensors [14], which has been demonstrated to be useful in assessing motor performance [15, 16]. Sensors on robotic devices can collect the duration of completing a task, the smoothness of patients’ movements, and the jerkiness of the resulting trajectories, all of which have been shown to be valid indicators of recovery [18, 19] that are often useful to physical therapists for assessing patients’ progress [20]
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