Ubiquitous Rehabilitation Center: An Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network Based Rehabilitation Management System

This paper documents the implementation of a system, the ubiquitous rehabilitation center, which integrates a Zigbee-based wireless network with sensors that monitor patients and rehabilitation machines. These sensors interface with Zigbee motes which in turn interface with a server application that manages all aspects of the rehabilitation center and allows rehabilitation specialists to assign prescriptions to patients. Patients carry out prescriptions while the system monitors and collects all pertinent session data, storing it in a database. The rehabilitation specialist is then able to use trend-based analysis techniques on collected data in order to evaluate a patient's condition. Specialists then assign further prescriptions based on this evaluation. Consequently patients are treated more effectively while potentially spending less time in rehabilitation. This paper demonstrates how the ubiquitous rehabilitation center improves on the traditional rehabilitation center by highlighting the differences in rehabilitation methods using the two systems in an ACL rehabilitation test case.