AR based upper limb rehabilitation system

More than 62,000 Australians were reported suffered from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) and Cerebrovascular Accident (CVA) or stroke in 2011. These injuries and accidents lead to physical disability that yields in limitation for performing a person's daily life activities. To overcome such limitations, physical rehabilitation is conducted which requires one-to-one attention that creates a shortage in therapists and lead to high cost. In this paper, a development of an effective augmented reality (AR) based upper limb rehabilitation system with low cost is presented. Our development aims to close the gap in shortage of therapists, high health care cost of TBI, SCI and stroke. The proposed system can be used at home as well as in rehabilitation centers, units, and hospitals with minimum therapist supervision. It consists of two modules: AR based rehabilitation exercises module and real-time active muscle module. The first module aims to increase the upper limb range of motion via reaching exercises, and strengthen the associated muscles. In second module, the patient's EMG signals were used as an input to monitor the muscle performance in real time during training. Our development had tested with 10 healthy subjects and had demonstrated in Port Kembla Rehabilitation Hospital.