ICT technologies for motor skills rehabilitation after stroke
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SHORT ORIGINAL PAPER
ICT technologies for motor skills rehabilitation after stroke Andrea Vitali1
· Daniele Regazzoni1 · Caterina Rizzi1
Received: 1 July 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The rehabilitation process after stroke may exhibit some limits regarding physical therapy adherence and there could be a lack of patients’ motivation and trust impacting on the quality of the rehabilitation procedure. This research work aims at introducing a specific interactive design method to develop rehabilitation tools based on the medical knowledge and VR devices to recover motor skills of patients’ hands after stroke and to increase the patients’ adherence. The method we propose consists of three main steps: medical requirement analysis, identification of ICT tools, and medical data management. A case study related to hand rehabilitation is also presented. Keywords Stroke rehabilitation · Virtual reality · Hand-tracking devices · Leap motion device
1 Introduction Approximately 1.1 million inhabitants of Europe suffered a stroke each year [2]. Surviving patients may need to recover brain abilities, including mnemonic and motor skills. Specific rehabilitation processes are needed to restore movements of hands relative to basic gestures such as grabbing and holding objects. At present, the traditional rehabilitation path requires a period from 3 to 6 months to recover the patient’s motor skills useful to return at a good lifestyle. After the discharge from the hospital, physicians and physiotherapists recommend patients to perform simple rehabilitation exercises. However, the conventional approach presents several limits regarding the physical therapy adherence [5]. In fact, an inadequate access to rehabilitation centres and limited clinical resources may cause the patients to drop the therapy before time. Lack of motivation and trust has a huge impact on the quality of the rehabilitation process both in hospital and at home. Furthermore, physicians and physiotherapists would benefit from a more objective approach to measure the patients’ improvements. The advent of VR
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Andrea Vitali [email protected] Daniele Regazzoni [email protected] Caterina Rizzi [email protected]
1
Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
solutions has opened a new frontier to design innovative rehabilitation tools. Moreno et al. [4] present a wide systematic review about the use of VR technology for rehabilitation of patients with traumatic brain injury. They presented innovative devices and VR applications that have been exploited in several research works in the last two decades. In particular, devices as haptic gloves, motion capture systems and head mounted displays have been used for creating VR solutions, which are mainly serious-games used by patients to perform a task, such as cooking a meal or playing the “whack a mole” game. Several research studies highlighted how VR gives a medica
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