ExerciseCheck: data analytics for a remote monitoring and evaluation platform for home-based physical therapy

Abstract

Home-based exercising is a vital part of any physical therapy program. With correct execution of the exercises, faster recovery from physical impairments can be achieved. With the conventional approaches, however, a home-based physical therapy program may not be as effective due to the lack of supervision by the therapist at home. ExerciseCheck is designed as a remote monitoring and evaluation platform for individuals involved in home-based physical therapy. The goal of ExerciseCheck is to provide patients and physical therapists with real-time visual feedback and quantitative analysis. In this paper, we discuss the progress we have made toward (1) a more comprehensive analysis of the performance of the patient and (2) informative feedback to the patient and the physical therapist. Furthermore, in order to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our system, we have performed an experiment in a clinical setting involving five patients with Parkinson disease. We describe how ExerciseCheck can quantitatively evaluate the user's performance and identify their problems. We assessed how ExerciseCheck can impact the performance and the overall experience of the patient. Our results show that ExerciseCheck is a user-friendly system that patients and physical therapists can easily interact with. Patients benefit from visual and quantitative feedback and apply this to subsequent repetitions of the exercises.