A Distributed Gamified System Based on Automatic Assessment of Physical Exercises to Promote Remote Physical Rehabilitation

Physical rehabilitation aims at improving the functional ability and quality of life of patients affected by physical impairments or disabilities. Neurological diseases represent the largest cause of disability worldwide. For many, there is no cure and physiotherapy allows symptoms to be managed. Physiotherapy is based on the daily execution of exercises, traditionally under the supervision of a therapist. However, performing these exercises requires that both the patient and the physiotherapist are together so that the physiotherapist can assist the patient while exercising. For patients with a neurological condition, rehabilitation is a long term process, lasting months or even years. Not withstanding the personal costs, the cost of care/physiotherapy is high and represents €27,711 per year in Spain. This is compounded by a shortage of qualified therapists, often cited as one reason why stroke survivors do not received the recommended amount of therapy. The challenge is even greater in low to mid-income countries where there is a lack of trained personnel as well as under-served and remote regions. Technology can be employed to alleviate these problems by remotely monitoring a rehabilitation session taking place at home or anywhere in the community. This paper presents a computer vision-based system for home-use that automatically assesses how well the patient performs the exercises and transmits the information back to the clinic. The patient and physiotherapist do not need to be co-located. Gamification methods and techniques are used to engage patients when carrying out the rehabilitation routines. To this end, we propose a distributed gamified system that automatically evaluates the performance of exercises by analyzing and comparing motion curves using the DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) algorithm.