A novel wireless 3D monitoring system for physical rehabilitation

With the rapid aging of population, population that need physical rehabilitation increase rapidly, resulting in shortage of physical therapist. One of an important but less sensible measure of a patient in physical rehabilitation is the state of balance at a certain part of the body. This paper proposes a novel wireless 3D monitoring (W3DM) system for patients in physical rehabilitation. A patient in physical rehabilitation may wear or attached one or more W3DM modules at the particular part of his body when he works on a physical exercise, e.g. backbone, shoulders, elbows, knees, etc. The W3DM module consists of a 3-axis accelerometer that traces the 3D movements of the patient´s exercise and a Bluetooth transceiver that passes the collected 3D data to a nearby monitoring workstation (MW) and receive warning and regulatory signals replied by the MW. The MW stores the received 3D data for doctor´s examination on the patient´s progress and also compares immediately the received 3D movements with the pre-programmed tracks and sends a warning or regulatory signal back to the W3DM module if needed. The proposed system not only releases the burden of physical therapist but also helps discover insensible conditions of the patient and thus regulates patient´s correct exercise. Currently, a novel wireless 1D balance monitoring (W1DBM) system has been implemented and the W3DBM system will be our future work.