Implementation of tele-rehabilitation system combined with video call center

Japan's low birthrate and rapidly aging population are causing medical expenses to take up ever more of the national budget and leading to a shortage of young medical professionals. As a result, rehabilitation therapy is being shifted from hospital-care to home-care. Several other countries will also face the same situation in the near future. Thus, we propose a tele-rehabilitation system combined with a video call center to make up for the shortage of rehabilitation therapy done by visiting physiotherapists. A video call center operator coaches a patient instead of a physiotherapist, and a physiotherapist supervises multiple operators. The system focuses on cerebrovascular patients who have a home-visit rehabilitation or an outpatient one and uses Microsoft KINECT to measure strain of the upper body. In this paper, implementation of this system is mainly described.