Wearable Sensor Devices for Prevention and Rehabilitation in Healthcare: Swimming Exercise With Real-Time Therapist Feedback

Abstract

Wearable sensor devices are playing an increasingly important role in providing pervasive and personalized healthcare. Important elements of modern healthcare services are physical rehabilitation and injury prevention. Wearable sensor devices attached to the patient can offer valuable supplemental information to healthcare professionals during treatment or therapy. In physical rehabilitation, wearable inertial sensor devices help therapists to monitor and evaluate parameters and key performance indicators of the rehabilitation activities. Therapy efficiency can be increased by using real-time feedback systems. Three different feedback system architectures are defined and studied: 1) therapist; 2) user; and 3) cloud system. A case study involving rehabilitation therapy based on swimming exercises was performed. Field test results show that the developed sensor device and real-time therapist feedback application provide sufficiently accurate and precise data for the efficient evaluation of swimming parameters, such as stroke time and stroke rotation angle symmetry. Rehabilitation therapists should be able to operate the system without the constant presence of trained and experienced technical personnel (engineers). The wide adoption of wearable sensor device-based applications will lead to cloud systems where big data analytics will offer additional benefits to healthcare, well-being, and quality of life.