Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Canada's aging population is expected to create an increasing burden on health care resources, particularly those treatments and procedures which are cost and labour intensive such as rehabilitation. One example is knee and hip rehabilitation, typically following joint replacement surgery. The demand for knee/hip rehabilitation is expected to increase significantly as our population ages. Currently, such rehabilitation requires a one-to-one patient therapist ratio. The therapist observes human movement, performs assessment and recommends treatment. The protocol is time-intensive for the therapist and requires subjective human movement evaluation by the therapist, which may be difficult to measure accurately by eye and therapist dependent. This research project proposes the development of an automated rehabilitation system to enable quantitative measurement of human motion during the performance of rehabilitation exercises. Small wearable sensors worn by the patient and embedded in the rehabilitation equipment will transmit real-time movement data to a nearby computer. The project will develop hardware, software and user interfaces to enable automatic assessment of movement performance from the measured data to provide real time feedback to the patient and the therapist. The software will also enable recording of the movement data, so that the patient's performance over time can be analyzed for diagnosis and treatment evaluation and selection.