3D Kinematics for Remote Patient Monitoring

DESCRIPTION:

The main goal of this project is to explore the feasibility of remote monitoring in brain stroke rehabilitation based on the analysis of 3D movements captured with smartbands (a worldwide and non-intrusive technology). We aim to derive from the 3D kinematics an objective estimator of the improvement of the patients’ motor abilities during rehabilitation.

We base our analysis on the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement, which provides a mathematical description of the movements made by individuals, reflecting the behaviour of their neuromuscular system. It has demonstrated a great potential for monitoring neuromuscular diseases, among others, in terms of the alteration of the ideal parameters. However, it requires robust algorithms to estimate the model parameters with an excellent precision for a meaningful neuromuscular analysis. So far, such algorithms have focused mainly on 1D and 2D movements in a controlled scenario, e.g. pen movements on a tablet computer. This constraint makes the approach unrealistic as a worldwide tool for treating certain cerebrovascular accidents, such as brain strokes.

This explorative work will have a great impact in homecare telehealth tasks. The integration of an analytic tool in a consumer and affordable technology such as smartbands could be used for continuous remote patient monitoring in the rehabilitation stages, improving the medical efficiency and reducing the healthcare costs. From a technological point of view, the ground-breaking novelty of this proposal is the adaptation of the parameter extraction for the kinematic model to a sequence of continuous 3D movements in an unconstrained scenario, paving the way for applications in biomedicine, biometrics, robotics, simulations, video games, human-machine interfaces, etc.