Kires: a data-centric telerehabilitation system based on kinect

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the worldwide demand for rehabilitation services. To meet these needs, there will have to be developed systems of telerehabilitation that will bring services to even the most remote locations, through Internet and related technologies.This thesis is addressing the area of remote health care delivery, in particular telerehabilitation. We present KiReS; a Kinect based telerehabilitation system which covers the needs of physiotherapists in the process of designing, managing and evaluating physiotherapy protocols and sessions and also covers the needs of the users providing them an intuitive and encouraging interface and giving useful feedback to enhance the rehabilitation process. As required for multi-disciplinary projects, physiotherapists were consulted and feedback from patients was incorporated at different development stages.KiReS aims to outcome limitations of other telerehabilitation systems and bring some novel features: 1) A friendly and helpful interaction with the system using Kinect and motivational interfaces based on avatars. 2) Provision of smart data that supports physiotherapists in the therapy design process by: assuring the maintenance of appropriate constraints and selecting for them a set of exercises that are recommended for the user. 3) Monitoring of rehabilitation sessions through an algorithm that evaluates online performed exercises and sets if they have been properly executed. 4) Extensibility, KiReS is designed to be loaded with a broad spectrum of exercises and protocols.