Instrumented Training Equipment in Smart Physiotherapy Ecosystem
Octavian Adrian Postolache
DCTI, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisboa/IT, Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal
ABSTRACT
Mobile health and instrumented equipment represents together a major part of delivering next generation healthcare systems. The challenge is not only delivery of quality care to underserved populations in remote areas and inner cities, but also to lighten the load and to increase the impact of trained healthcare workers including physicians and physiotherapists. The tutorial reviews the recent advances in the development of sensing solutions for vital signals and motor activity monitoring especially during the physical rehabilitation periods in order to optimize the process that may originate the reducing recovering time.
Motor activity signals associated with upper limb and lower limb rehabilitation are acquired through microwave motion sensor, MEMS inertial measurement units, piezo resistive and piezoelectric dynamic force sensors special attention being granted to signal conditioning circuits as so as to the acquisition and wireless communications modules. Elements about smart sensors standard for instrumented training equipment are discussed.
Virtual reality implementations and serious game for therapy are considered also as part of tutorial content the information delivered by sensors associated with training equipment being used to interact with virtual reality objects during rehabilitation process. Using a set of metrics that are calculated using the information delivered by unobtrusive sensors embedded in training equipment objective evaluation of rehabilitation session effectiveness is carried out. Elements of signal processing algorithms, motion classifiers are considered in the presentation. Additionally taking into account the health status condition of the users under physiotherapy process the vital signs monitoring solutions are discussed in the tutorial.
The interactions between the healthcare professionals and the instrumented equipment are related to the usage of mobile applications for tablets and smart phone. A state of art of existing solutions in the field of physical rehabilitation will be considered.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Prof. Dr. Octavian Adrian Postolache (M’99, SM’2006) graduated in Electrical Engineering at the Gh. Asachi Technical University of Iasi, Romania, in 1992 and he received the PhD degree in 1999 from the same university, where he worked as assistant professor. In 2000 he became principal researcher of Instituto de Telecomunicações, Invited Professor of EST/IPS Setubal in 2001. In 2012 he joined ISCTE-IUL Lisbon where he is currently assistant professor. His fields of interests are smart sensors for biomedical and environmental applications, pervasive sensing and computing, electrophysiological signal processing, computational intelligence with application in automated measurement systems. He is vice-director of Instituto de Telecomunicações/ISCTE-IUL delegation, and he was leader of several collaboration projects between the Instituto de Telecomunicaçoes and the industry such as Home TeleCare project with Portuguese Telecommunication Agency for Innovation (PT Inovação), Integrated Spectrum Monitoring project with National Communication Agency (ANACOM). He is active member of national and international research teams involved in Portuguese and EU and International projects. Dr. Postolache is author and co-author of 10 patents, 7 books, 14 book chapters, more than 280 papers published in international journals and proceedings of international with peer review. He is IEEE Senior Membe, chair of IEEE IMS TC-13 Wireless and Telecommunications in Measurements, distinguished lecturer of IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, member of IEEE IMS and EMBS technical committees. He is member of Sensor Council and Associate Editor of IEEE Sensors Journal, and he served as chair or TPC chair of different IEEE, EAI and INSTICC conferences such IEEE MeMeA 2014 as general chair, ICST 2015 as TPC chair.