A mobile cloud-supported e-rehabilitation platform for brain-injured patients

Currently, brain injury rehabilitation programs aid patients to regain their daily living skills. In these programs, each patient has to repeatedly perform a wide range of rehabilitation exercises under the in situ supervision of health professionals, normally, in a medical center or (unusually) at home, during training sessions. This model entails frequent displacements, either of professionals or patients for the sessions to be supervised. A Home-based and mobile e-rehabilitation platform by which patients could be effectively supervised, remotely and asynchronously, during the performance of the prescribed exercises can be an alternative to this model that would reduce number of displacements. Mobile devices and novel computation paradigms such as Cloud Computing can be used to support cooperation and interaction between health professionals, patients and their relatives in order to come up with home-based e-rehabilitation programs for brain-injured patients where medical records about patient performances are easily accessible and stored. This paper describes CloudRehab, a customizable home-based e-rehabilitation platform for brain-injured patients that make use of mobile devices, commercial heart rate sensors, Web and Cloud Computing technologies, which has been validated with several patients.