APPLICATION OF AUTOMATON MODEL TO SUPPORT REHABILITATION OF MOTOR SKILLS OF PATIENTS

Abstract

Rehabilitation of patients during illnesses associated with the loss of motor skills, such as multiple sclerosis, is an important task of medicine. Effective in these cases are gaming approaches that increase patient motivation, which in the field of e-Health form the direction of “Serious Games”. The essential requirements in the development of Serious Games are the continuity of training, which should be carried out not only in a specialized center, but al-so by the patient himself at home, as well as the accuracy of the movements performed by the patient; otherwise, the outcome of the rehabilitation will be doubtful or even negative. As the basis for satisfying the rigorous requirements for the correctness of the movements performed the automatic simulation of the game process is chosen. Serious Games differ from regular games in a significantly smaller number of possible states, which makes them convenient for applying this approach. At the same time, in contrast to the previously considered applications of au-tomaton models in medical systems, such as, for example, systems for sup-porting hemodialysis, in the case of a game, the parameters of each state can vary over a fairly wide range. In the article, this problem is considered in the example of rehabilitation of pinch movements of hands by performing physical exercises in a specialized video game form using motion capture of fingers on a smartphone. The Ab-stract State Machine method is used to build the automaton model applicable to the Serious Game for pinch movement, which provides opportunities and motivation of the patient to do independent exercises. To build the resulting model, the method of successive refinements is used, on each of which veri-fication is performed, which provides the necessary control over the accuracy of patient movements.