Search

About 60 to 90% of the population has experienced low back pain (LBP) once in their life; yearly this is 5% of the population. Non specific chronic low back pain (NSCLBP) is LBP without a specific cause that lasts longer than twelve weeks. Research has shown that exercise therapy is the most effective rehabilitation method; and can be enhanced by technological systems. This knowledge served as a base for the development of Mirrorcle. Mirrorcle is an interactive mirror that provides a set of exercises, designed for persons suffering from NSCLBP. By giving extrinsic feedback during and after the exercises, Mirrorcle enables patients to perform their exercises better and learn more from them. Five physiotherapists rated the credibility for the use of Mirrorcle in rehabilitation as high and the expectancy for good treatment results as moderate. A usability questionnaire and observation was done with one LBP patient. During this test, the usability of Mirrorcle was perceived positive.

Recovery of walking function is a vital goal of post-stroke rehabilitation. Cueing using audio metronomes has been shown to improve gait, but can be impractical when interacting with others, particularly outdoors where awareness of vehicles and bicycles is essential. Audio is also unsuitable in environments with high background noise, or for those with a hearing impairment. If successful, lightweight portable tactile cueing has the potential to take the benefits of cueing out of the laboratory and into everyday life. The Haptic Bracelets are lightweight wireless devices containing a computer, accelerometers and low-latency vibrotactiles with a wide dynamic range. In this paper we review gait rehabilitation problems and existing solutions, and present an early pilot in which the Haptic Bracelets were applied to post-stroke gait rehabilitation. Tactile cueing during walking was well received in the pilot, and analysis of motion capture data showed immediate improvements in gait.

Recovery of walking function is a major goal of post-stroke rehabilitation. Audio metronomic cueing has been shown to improve gait, but can be impractical and inconvenient to use in a community setting, for example outdoors where awareness of traffic is needed, as well as being unsuitable in environments with high background noise, or for those with a hearing impairment. Silent lightweight portable tactile cueing, if similarly successful, has the potential to take the benefits out of the lab and into everyday life. The Haptic Bracelets, designed and built at the Open University originally for musical purposes, are self- contained lightweight wireless devices containing a computer, Wi-Fi chip, accelerometers and low-latency vibrotactiles with a wide dynamic range. In this paper we outline gait rehabilitation problems and existing solutions, and present an early pilot in which the Haptic Bracelets were applied to post-stroke gait rehabilitation.

This chapter presents an intuitive user interface based on a self-adaptive architecture. It uses a consumer-range 3D hand capture device that allows its users to interactively edit objects in 3D space. While running, the system monitors the user’s behaviors and performance in order to maintain an up-to-date user model. This model then drives the re-arrangement and reparameterization of a rule-based system that controls the interaction. A user study let us define the initial parameters of this self-adaptive system. This preliminary study was conducted in a 3D infographics and animation school on 15 students. The study was both qualitative and quantitative: the qualitative evaluation consisted of a SUMI evaluation questionnaire while the quantitative evaluation consisted of analysing manually annotated recordings of the subjects together with a fine-grained log of the interaction mechanics. We believe that the self-adaptive aspects of the system is well suited to the problematics of rehabilitation. This system could, from the beginning, adapt to both the user’s impairments and needs, then follow and adapt its interaction logic according to the user’s progress. Such a system would, for instance, enable a clinician or a therapist to design tailored rehabilitation activities accounting for the patient’s exact physical and physiological condition.