PIER 58 SOPHY TEAM

PROJECT

Sonification & Gamification of Physiotherapy

SUMMARY

Movement is key to healthy ageing and recovery from injuries or even pathologies. Physiotherapists and practitioners prescribe exercises that take the human body through certain movements, creating certain forces. Fundamental to the expected benefits of these exercises is their precise execution, easy under the watchful eye of the physiotherapist, but difficult when alone at home. Sonification can provide real-time audio feedback, with elements of feed-forward, that provides a quantitative reference for the correct execution of movements.

RESOURCES

Expertise in human machine interfaces, embedded electronics, wireless sensors, data sonification - interdisciplinary team including electronic engineers/physicists, mobile and web software developers, a musician and a sport science/physiotherapy expert.i

Key sentence

We are creating a method of improving adherence to hand physiotherapy after a stroke.

The Problem

• Physiotherapy is the most powerful tool for recovering disability. However, 80 % of patients do not adhere to their physiotherapy program.
• The barriers to physiotherapy adherence are

• Lack of motivation
• No feedback
• Social isolation

What are we doing?

Therefore, we are making a device to increase adherence to physiotherapy exercises by:

• Creating a motivating environment by turning movement into music and gamification
• Providing patients with feedback of their performance through music and gamification.
• Creating a community of of patients to reduce isolation through networked sonification and gamification In addition we are also providing quantitative data for their health practitioners

How are we doing it?

Creating a feedback device for physiotherapy, that works through sonification and gamification. Our specific application: Stroke is the second largest cause of disability in the world. Paralysis of the arm is one of the most common disabilities resulting from stroke, Loss of use of hand function to grasp objects leads to loss of independence and poor quality of life after a stroke. We are building a glove, SoPhy, that tracks the movement of the hand and the arm. This movement tracking enables us to:

• Feedback of performance via sound and AR gamification
• Create an artistic representation of the movements through sonification and AR
• Data to be streamed and shared in real time to create a community who can rehabilitate together, remotely.
• Provide data for practitioners to individually tailor their rehab program.

IDEA: Hand Sensor

Description of the idea

A smart glove with sensors to help rehabilitation and physiotherapy, in particular for stroke patients

Health benefits/outcomes

This technology tracks the position of the fingers, hand and forearm. It enables quantitative tracking and sonification/gamification of the hand movements to inform rehabilitation for reach and grasp trasks

Sensors and variables

• Smart fibre glove prototype

Or, if not available, 5 flex sensors to capture finger movements For example: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Generic-Flex-Sensor-4-5/dp/B004TAA2PU

• Accelerometers/gyroscope to detect the position of the hand in the 3D space and measure oscillations, vibrations and detect movements.

• 5 small pressure sensors (to detect and measure grip)

• Optional: a vibration transducer (small vibrotactile module to provide haptic feedback)

Possible development platforms

AVR/Arduino or ARM Mbed (LPC1768, Nucleo F411RE) using the online really user-friendly development environment (http://mbed.org and https://developer.mbed.org/accounts/login/?next=%2Fcompiler%2F)