The role of visualization in tele-rehabilitation: A case study

Recent developments in the field of wearable computing have enabled the deployment of wearable sensors in many area, such as health care and sports. Continuous monitoring of a person's physical activity and movement data facilitates a physician's - or another care giver's - ability to simultaneously monitor multiple patients remotely. Care givers can access real-time data acquired from different sensors, allowing them to offer an appropriate intervention. However, collecting, analyzing, and visualizing the vast amounts of raw data in order to extract and provide valuable information is still a challenge. Recent technologies embedded in smartphones enable sensing the motions of a person. This paper aims to study methods to analyze a patient's physical activity and progress by visualizing her/his motion data. We provide insight into data gathered from multiple sensors built into a smartphone through visualization. We have conducted a case study to evaluate subjects' upper limb movements using data acquired while they were executing various rehabilitation exercises over a period of time. In this paper we present interactive visualizations to better understand the subjects' motion during that period of time. These visualizations offer better insight into the data, as compared to text-only reports. Such analysis and visualization of rich data stand to offer improvements and cost-savings to healthcare. Likewise, they can offer value to many other fields that need to analyze large amounts of data.