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The StrokeBack project aims at increasing the rehabilitation speed of stroke patients while patients are in their own home. The benefit we expect from our approach is twofold. Most patients feel psychologically better in their own environment than in hospital and also rehabilitation speed is improved. In addition, we aim at exploiting the increased motivation of patients when exercising with a tool similar to a gaming console.
The ability of doing high quality exercises without the need of being directly monitored by a physiotherapist helps to reduce healthcare cost through minimisation of expensive human contact hours. Currently the quantity of hours performing occupational (ergotherapeutic) and physiotherapeutic sessions are restricted to payable effort for patient’s accommodation, transport or visit of therapists in the patient’s home. StrokeBack aims at providing new technical means and service structures to enable patients to enhance their healthiness by increasing the number of training sessions while still being monitored by the system. By ensuring proper execution of physiotherapy trainings in an automated guided way, modulated by appropriate clinical knowledge and in supervised way only when necessary, StrokeBack empowers the patients to exercise much more and at better quality than it is possible today. By that StrokeBack improves rehabilitation speed, and quality of life of the patient.
The StrokeBack concept will be complemented by a Patient Health Record (PHR), in which rehabilitation exercises, training measurements and vital data of the patients will be stored. Thus, the PHR provides all necessary information medical and rehabilitation experts need to evaluate rehabilitation success, e.g. to deduce relations between selected exercises and rehabilitation speed of different patients, as well as to assess the overall healthiness of the patient. In addition, the PHR will be used to provide the patient with mid-term feedback, e.g., her/his rehabilitation speed compared to average, as well as improvements over last day/weeks, in order to keep patients motivation high.