Telerehab

Patients with reduced mobility need to exercise and keep exercising continuously to improve their condition and motor skills. Some people will be able to undertake their rehabilitation at home by themselves with occasional contact from a health professional. Others will need more intensive care and support. At the same time, the family also has to adjust to this new situation and understand the key role they play in the patient’s treatment. Moreover, no two patients are alike in their circumstances or their symptoms, so two treatments cannot be equal. By means of this project, we intend to address the following points:To Re-educate and maintain the entire voluntary control available.To incorporate treatment techniques in livelihoods, relating them with appropriate daily activities, providing this way maintenance of all the improvement obtained.To stimulate any sensitive and perceptual experience, and maintain the experience of the normal movement throughout the progression of the disease, not only to exploit the potential, but also to enable the patient to feel safer and to move fore freely, claiming to be required the assistance of relatives or aides, in the later stages of the illness. In order to create an accessible, powerful, low-cost and easy-to-use tool we have designed a technological solution presented in Figure 1.The telerehabilitation tool has two views, one for the medical professionals and one for the patients:Figure 1. Telerehabilitation tool main architectureProfessional’s view contains everything necessary to ensure efficient monitoring as well as all the necessary to provide content to the system. To add content, the professionals have several modules: exercises, questions, repository, forum, blog and users’ management. To monitor users, the professionals have the monitoring module and the history module, which acts like the monitoring module but with the ability to select dates. Finally, professional view has a chat, videoconference and a notification center module.Patients’ view offers a personalized monitoring module and forum, blog, videoconference, chat, recording and notification center modules. The telerehabilitation tool is modular-designed, and each feature is represented by a module. To create these modules, we used WEB technologies like PHP, JavaScript and AJAX, and some multimedia technologies like Red5 and Adobe Flex. Web technologies allowed us to develop all the necessary modules based on the needs of users and multimedia technologies provided us the necessary to build online communication modules. We chose Adobe Flex instead of another Web technology like HTML5 because HTML5’s necessary APIs for multimedia treatment (videoconference and recording) can’t run properly on some web browsers like Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 or Firefox 3.x and above.As stated above, the system is designed on the basis of modularity, and each module is independent, with some of them interconnected to offer extra functionality. Every module is described below briefly cc): Recording module. This module is exclusive to patients; by means of it, every patient has the possibility to record the exercise during the execution. Monitoring and history module. Monitoring module allows the professional to see the evolution of each patients, day-by-day, and enables a personalized treatment, based on the characteristics and the evolution of the patient. History module acts like the monitoring module but whit the option to choose between two dates.Exercises and Questions modules. Only the professionals are able to use these modules. With these modules, the professionals can set up a repository of exercises and questions.Users’ management module. This module is used for creating users and for controlling system and account policies.Notification center. This module shows the latest updates in the system.Forum and Blog modules. Forum and blog offer offline communication. These modules make it possible to create thematic threads involving both professionals and patients. Chat and Videoconferencemodules. Both use Red5 technology. Those modules offer a direct link between the professional and the patient, either by text or by video/audio.