A Full Body Sensing System for Monitoring Stroke Patients in a Home Environment

Abstract

Currently, the changes in functional capacity and performance of stroke patients after returning home from a rehabilitation hospital is unknown to a physician, having no objective information about the intensity and quality of a patient’s daily-life activities. Therefore, there is a need to develop and validate an unobtrusive and modular system for objectively monitoring the stroke patient’s upper and lower extremity motor function in daily-life activities and in home training. This is the main goal of the European FP7 project named “INTERACTION”. A complete full body sensing system is developed, whicj integrates Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), Knitted Piezoresistive Fabric (KPF) strain sensors, KPF goniometers, EMG electrodes and force sensors into a modular sensor suit designed for stroke patients. In this paper, we describe the complete INTERACTION sensor system. Data from the sensors are captured wirelessly by a software application and stored in a remote secure database for later access and processing via portal technology. Data processing includes a 3D full body reconstruction by means of the Xsens MoCap Engine, providing position and orientation of each body segment (poses). In collaboration with clinicians and engineers, clinical assessment measures were defined and the question of how to present the data on the web portal was addressed. The complete sensing system is fully implemented and is currently being validated. Patients measurements start in June 2014.