Development and first evaluation of a RF-based rehabilitation system

Abstract

Upper limb impairments represent a critical aspect affecting the quality of life of persons suffering from neuromotor diseases. Effective and continuative rehabilitation therapies are needed to regain upper limb functionalities, but high costs and lack of qualified personnel highlight the need of new technological solutions. This paper presents a system for the rehabilitation of upper limb in home-settings using light and low-cost equipment. The system uses RF technology to implement functional exercises resembling Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). Hardware and software have been developed for automatically guiding the execution of the rehabilitation exercises and sessions, allowing the patients to perform the therapy at home. The properties of the RF signals are used to compute metrics able to describe and evaluate the performance of the execution such as task execution time, velocity profile and distance covered. A set of exercises has been implemented and preliminary tested on a sample group of people, highlighting the usability and robustness of the system.