Rehabilitation exercise with real-time muscle simulation based EMG and AR

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) and Stroke or Cerebrovascular Accident (CVA) cause severe physical disability and affect the person´s quality of life. Therefore, rehabilitation therapies are essential for those patients to promote their quality of life and restore their lost functions to perform daily live activities. Daily care cost is very high for TBI, SCI and CVA that become major problem for the patients and their families. Moreover, shortage of therapists is one of the major problems in rehabilitation hospitals due to one to one basic training. To overcome these problems, this paper presents low cost motivated rehabilitation system with minimum supervision of therapist for upper limb system. The propose system can be used as a home based or rehabilitation center therapy system. It is has two modules namely rehabilitation exercise module and real-time muscle simulation module. Several Augmented Reality (AR) games have developed as rehabilitation exercises and integrated with real-time muscle simulation to complete the system. Real-time muscle simulation was achieved based on patient´s electromyography (EMG) signals in real time. While the system will work to retrain the elastic brain via fast recovery method, it is also will close the gap for the required information, by therapists, about monitoring and tracks the patient´s muscle performance. The system has tested with five healthy subjects and revealed with potential rehabilitation system for disabled people.