Tele-Rehab System

The tele-rehabilitation system allows 'remote therapy' and 'remote assessment' for patients who have neurological impairments or orthopaedic injuries by using any portable rehab device, haptic device, and internet.

1) Basic configurations:

• Tele-conferencing:
  The tele-rehab system is designed to provide physical as well as audiovisual interaction between clinician and patient. The clinician and patient could see and talk to each other using web-cameras and microphones connected through the internet.
  
  
• Device deployment :
  A low-cost and portable IntelliStretch device (slave device) can stretch the impaired joint remotely at patient's home or local clinics; The haptic device (master device) at clinician's office provides the clinician with haptic feel of the patient's joint so that the clinician can examine the patient's remotely.

2) Basic functionalities:

• Tele-accessment:
  The clinician could move a manikin limb mounted on the master device. T he movement information was recorded and sent through the internet to control the remote slave device with the patient’s arm attached to it. In this way, the patient’s limb undergoes identical movement as that of the manikin limb.

  Meanwhile, the resisting torque from the patient’s joint was measured and recreated at the master device so that the clinician could feel the resistance from the patient’s limb. Joint torque and angular rotation were measured at both the master and the slave devices and sent to their counterparts for real-time control of both devices. All information obtained could be used for clinical assessment.

• Tele-therapy:
  After the assessment, clinician could create a customized therapy for individual patient based on the result. Theraputic protocols are sent via internet to local device at patient side. On receiving the protocol, the portable IntelliStretch device could stretch the spastic/contractured joint accordingly by using specified parameters with our intelligent stretching algorithms to achieve better efficacy. Training data are also recorded and sent to an online medical information database that clinicians could download for further evaluation.

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