Development of a m-Health Hand Rehabilitation System for Stroke Patient Recovery

Problem Statement

Limited contact time with therapists and lack of hand-based rehabiilitative systems locally, resulting in slower recovery of hand function after stroke.

The current hand rehabilitative systems are expensive and not accessible to home-based stroke patients. In addition, the Telerehab system provided by IHiS lacks hand rehabilitative capabilities.

The intelligent system that the project aims to develop will enable therapists to engage, guide and track hand exercises of patients independently, allowing therapists to see more patients concurrently and also reducing the workload on caregivers, and address the issue of therapists shortages and the high PwDs-to-caregiver ratio.

Solution

To develop a mobile-health (m-Health) based Hand Rehabilitation System that can accurately track, guide and monitor rehabilitative exercises of patients towards recovery.

The system incorporates fun and interactive simulations for different degree of disabilities. It also integrates the use of commercially available infra-red cameras, mobile application and machine learning to improve the hand motor function recovery of the persons with disabilities and stroke patients, and in turn allows them to perform their Activities of Daily Living (ADL) better. The system will ultimately help caregivers alleviate their burden by allowing the rehabilitative training to be done at home.

Outcomes

Provide an engaging system that complements existing rehabilitative programme to accelerate recovery of Persons with Disabilities and alleviate the supervision and workload of their caregivers.

More about grantee

Established in 1981, the Institute of Systems Science at National University of Singapore (NUS-ISS) provides graduate education, professional development courses, consultancy and research services. NUS-ISS objectives are to develop infocomm leaders, and drive business and organisation innovation.