Tele Rehabilitation

Duration: 2010-now
Collaborators: dr. Jay Han, University of California Davis Medical Center (UCDMC)
Funding: CITRIS Seed Grant 2011

Description:
As we have demonstrated in our past research experiments of teaching TaiChi using teleimmersive feedback, users are able to learn faster and better with this technology. In collaboration with Dr. Jay Han, University of California at Davis Medical Center (UCDMC) we are building a framework for tele-rehabilitation. Our focus is accurate and reliable assessments of upper extremity which is critical because functionality of upper extremity affects essentially all activities of daily living, independence, and overall quality of life. In this application we have a remote health-coach who is instructing the patient during his/her exercises through the teleimmersion technology. From the stereo data, we extract the skeleton representation for two reasons: one is to reduce the size of data transmission which may be important for rural clinics with limited bandwidth availability and second are privacy reasons. We are developing markerless body-tracking algorithm and workspace analysis for upper extremity from the 3D video data sources. The patient gets the visual feedback to correct his/her performance while various tasks in the virtual environment can be design to elevate the attention of the patient. With respect to the proposed teleimmersive framework, we will research integration of different sensors with visual data for real-time feedback within a telemedicine model. We are also interested in modeling of the coach and student with respect to body dynamics and movement prediction and to provide appropriate feedback on the performance to the patient. The research was supported through 2011 by CITRIS Seed Grant.

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