I-SMILE Smart Healthcare

The Smart Healthcare project is a research initiative to investigate and develop a new system for allowing physical therapists to remotely monitor the rehabilitation progress of their patients. The hardware component of this project includes an array of wearable, wireless sensors for monitoring the upper limb range of motion, as well as trunk movement.

The software component consists of an application to gather the motion data from the sensor arrays, process the data to recreate the patients’ movements, and then present the clinically relevant information for each patient to a therapist, with a special note made for any abnormalities found with the recorded motions.

This research can help to meet clinical needs and social acceptance barriers to guide the development of wearable sensors. However, we must consider the protection of patients’ private healthcare data. User-friendly interfaces for patients, therapists and doctors and assessment of rehabilitation effectiveness would be good future research topics.