Background
In our elderly-dominated society, there is considerable expectation for a growing need for home, medical, and nursing care services to assist this ageing society, both from the physical and psychological points of view. Among these services, special importance has the rehabilitation process and specifically the clinical assessments of motor abilities. The current rehabilitation process, however, lacks of objectiveness.Objective
Our research aims at objectively measuring and assessing the physical and physiological effects of the rehabilitation therapy by using WB-3 system, both in the hospital/rehabilitation center and at home, by integrating the analysis of human motion into the analysis of physiological indexes.
Results
The preliminary results show that the WB-3 IMU has very high performance and, thanks to its reduced size, is a perfect candidate for the realization of a wearable whole-body sensorized suit.Relevant publications
- K. Kawamura, Y. Morita, J. Okamoto, K. Saito, S. Sessa, M. Zecca, A. Takahashi, S. Takasugi, and M. G. Fujie, “Gait Phase Detection using Foot Acceleration for Estimating Ground Reaction Force in Long Distance Gait Rehabilitation,” Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 828–837, 2012.
- S. Sessa, M. Zecca, Z. Lin, T. Sasaki, K. Itoh, and A. Takanishi, Waseda Bioinstrumentation System 3 as a tool for objective rehabilitation measurement and assessment - development of the inertial measurement unit, in IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics ICORR2009, Kyoto International Conference Center, Japan, 2009, pp. 115-120.