Rehab-aaService: a cloud-based motor rehabilitation digital assistant

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) are playing an important role in the ongoing revolution of the health-care system, introducing the domain of the so-called m-Health. The integration of BSN applications with Cloud-computing technologies is an emerging approach, promising to favor the diffusion of many m-Health services in real life. Among them, motor rehabilitation is one of the application areas where this is particularly true. Monitoring rehabilitation patients via communication networks and mobile computing systems is a crucial aspect since the idea of tying the opportunity to follow and monitor the patient at all post-admission stages through remote monitoring allows to substantially reduce the costs associated with the process. On the other hand, patients that can safely perform rehabilitation and be monitored remotely will get benefit in terms of comfort, physical stress, and economic cost. This paper introduces a motor rehabilitation digital assistant, called Rehab-aaService, based on a three-tier architecture that includes wearable motion sensor nodes, a personal mobile device, and a Cloud-based back-end supported by the BodyCloud middleware.