A Real Time Biofeedback System Using Visual User Interface for Physical Rehabilitation

This study was undertaken to investigate the effectiveness of biofeedback training when compared to conventional physical rehabilitation. Real time biofeedback plays an important role for patients and therapists to assessthe success and performance of the training process. Visual user interface allows new forms of therapy simplifying the process and increasing patients' motivation. An experimental investigation was conducted to study the effect of using a visual interface as an add-on therapy to standard exercises for Range of Motion (ROM) measurements in glenohumeral movements. Human movement was collected by a Kinect sensor and the ROM measurements were computed using spatial coordinates provided by the official Microsoft Kinect SDK. The design allows patients to train therapeutic exercises, while receiving different types of real time feedback indicating measures of performance evaluation through the course of the training. Moreover, both the environment and the training task are customizable to the patient needs. In order to evaluate the biofeedback effectiveness, subjects that participated in the study were required to do a therapeutic exercise twice: firstly following the instructions of the therapist and secondly adding the visual biofeedback to the therapist instructions. The results obtained suggest that the proposed visual interface was an effective tool to achieve a significant improvement in the performance of the exercise. The exercises correctness when performed with visual feedback was significantly higher than the same exercises performed without this visual stimulus. In trials where subjects received visual feedback, it was observed a greater effort to achieve the proposed objective and superior movement control. Given the potential benefits of biofeedback, the proposed interface can become a helpful tool to patients that can confirm the correctness of their exercises and therapiststhat can adapt the prescribed exercises considering patients' evolution and performance.publishersversionpublishe