Assessment of Spinal Cord Injured (SCI) Patients Based on Digital Motion Acquisition

Abstract

The rehabilitation process of post-injury patients requires a continuous monitoring by medical personnel, who has to understand if rehab exercises have been executed in correct way by the patient to improve his/her motoric conditions. At present, the assessment is based on several parameters well known in literature and on subjective knowledge of the physician, who bases evaluations on his/her experience. The subjectivity of an evaluation may affect the steps of the rehabilitation process and this usually happens when the medical personnel is composed by young practitioners with not enough experience or when the assessment has been done by different physicians with discordant points of view. Another bottleneck in the assessment of rehabilitation process is relative to inaccurate measurement of parameters useful for evaluating patient’s improvements. Usually, medical personnel measure improvements through a visual evaluation, which permits only to identify huge improvement or worsening. However, some research works highlight that small errors relative to postures and use of upper and lower limbs can create problems in the long term.