SCH: INT: Collaborative Research: "RehabBuddy" Extending Individualized Physical Rehabilitation Beyond the Clinic Using Wearable Technology to Empower Patients

The goal of this project is to assist patients to become more confident and self]reliant by providing them with a wearable technology system that can document performance of any exercise regardless of the level of rehabilitation. We are creating a system called RehabBuddyh which will track individualized limb motions for a patient being prescribed rehabilitation following a musculoskeletal injury. Currently patients are instructed in exercise using both verbal instruction and experiential learning when interacting with the therapist. They are then sent home with written instructions and self]report back on how the exercises are going. This results in two problems: 1) patients are on their own at home to perform their exercises without any re]assurances they are performing them correctly and 2) the therapist has no objective measure of how well or how often a patient is performing their exercises. The first objective of this project is create a simple to use motion capture system using inertial measurement units (IMUs) and a portable tablet to allow patients to perform exercises anywhere at any time while providing real]time feedback to assure exercises are performed correctly. The second objective is to evaluate the validity of the feedback system using state]of]the]art motion analysis laboratory to compare exercise performance with and without feedback to validate the accuracy of the feedback provided by the system. The significance of the project will be to provide enhanced engineering algorithms to allow development of simple feedback system to clinician for patient to use to document exercise performance outside of the supervision of rehabilitation specialists.