Wireless Real-Time Exercise System for Physical Telerehabilation

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every aspects of health delivery and encouraged researchers to replace in-person clinical visits with telecommunications. Such approach has great potential to support home-based exercises. A critical part of successful use of exercise equipment at patient homes is to account for potential patient’s needs, values and preferences for rehabilitation and exercise prescriptions. The goal if this pilot project is to conduct an initial usability assessment of a remotely controlled version of interactive bike (iBike) system which gives the clinical team the capability to monitor exercise progress in real time using simple graphical representation. The bike can be used for upper or lower limb rehabilitation. A customized tablet app was developed to provide user interface between the app and the bike sensors. The iBike system was tested using a quasi-experimental design based on pre-post single group comparison. Two separate sessions, with a gap of a week and no further training and use of iBikE system, were carried out to determine the usability of the iBikE system. The completion times of Task 1 and Task 2 changed from 8.6±4.7 seconds to 1.8±0.8 seconds and from 315.0±6.9 seconds to 303.4±1.1 seconds respectively. Between pre-post tests, the 3-item post-task survey scores increased and the usability scores increased from 92.0±8.6 to 97.0±3.3. From the question of “How likely are you to recommend this iBikE system to others?” the scores increased from 9.4±0.9 to 9.8±0.5. We concluded that further development and evaluation of the iBike system in different patient subgroups is warranted.