ICF based automation system for spinal cord injuries rehabilitation

Abstract

Disabilities, specially the ones caused by injuries of spinal cord, affect both people's behavior and participation in daily activities. Therefore, developing automated systems that monitor and assess the progress of Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) patients represents an accelerated need. In this paper we utilize the framework of the International Classification for Functioning, disability and health (ICF) in order to propose an automatic system for SCI patients progress monitoring and rehabilitation. The ICF is a reference classification system that aims at improving integration of health information and ensuring the collection of accurate health data. The proposed system is divided into three phases; namely (1) ICF code construction, (2) progress monitoring, and (3) progress assessment phases. Comparing the manual expert-based progress assessment to experimental results obtained by the proposed system in this article, an efficiency of 100% has been achieved by the three previously stated phases of the proposed system.