An Open and Extensible Data Acquisition and Processing Platform for Rehabilitation Applications

Recently we witnessed a great deal of progress in the field of medicine, as well as treatments that improve the patient therapy and care. However, physiotherapy and rehabilitation fields still face the challenges of treating patients in remote regions. Considering that, developing a data acquisition and processing platform that collects data of rehabilitation movements at home can play a key role in the success of a patient's recovery process. The designed system is composed of three main parts: wearable sensor capable of collecting movement data with 3 axial accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors, central hub for processing and a cloud system which is used as a link between the therapist and patient. The system was tested for purpose of monitoring rehabilitation exercises usually done during recovery from an elbow fracture. Experimental results have shown that the system presented in this paper gives successful results for rehabilitation applications.