A real-time monitoring platform for assessing rehabilitation of the lower extremities in athletes

Abstract

The first prototype of a real-time monitoring platform for assessing rehabilitation of injuries in the lower extremities in athletes is presented. The system provides patients, their doctors and trainers with real-time monitoring, alerting and medical decision support feedback during exercise. It aims to help optimize treatment and training procedures during rehabilitation, to reduce the instances of injury relapse and to enable a prompt return to peak athletic condition. This first prototype is a hybrid portable/wearable version, the final aim being to make it completely wearable. The platform is composed of a sensing unit, a wearable processing unit and a remote monitoring unit. The sensing unit includes six goniometers for monitoring motion parameters, two temperature thermistors for assessing the condition of the injury, and an event "pain" marker button for monitoring pain. The wearable processing unit performs preliminary processing of the received signals, generates alerts and provides feedback and wireless data transfer to the rehabilitation unit. The rehabilitation unit is the main control, access and communication point of the system carrying out most of the data processing. The measurements are fed into an intelligent module, providing monitoring, alerting and decision support feedback to the athletes, trainers and doctors through a virtual reality interface and instant display of the monitored parameters.