Optimizing patients' engagement by a cyber-physical rehabilitation system

Abstract

Successful rehabilitation of stroke patients is strongly dependent on the engagement of patients. During a whole rehabilitation program, mundane rehabilitation exercises can easily become routine for patients, leading to boredom and as a result to ineffective functional recovery. This has been taken into consideration just by few rehabilitation systems. Engagement in rehabilitation can be decomposed into long term engagement (LTE) and short term engagement (STE) for the reason that their indicators and stimulation strategies are different. This paper proposes various engaging strategies to optimize both LTE and STE of patients. Actually, proposes to combine the strategies concerning the whole rehabilitation program and the strategies to be applied during single rehabilitation exercises. Based on the proposed reasoning model, a cyber-physical computingbased solution for a personalized rehabilitation system is proposed. Various cyberphysical characteristics, such as function augmentation, adaptive and learning control, are being implemented in the system in order to realize the various strategies of engagement.