Wearable Textile Platform for Assessing Stroke Patient Treatment in Daily Life Conditions

Monitoring physical activities during post-stroke rehabilitation in daily life may help physicians to optimize and tailor the training program for patients. The European research project INTERACTION (FP7-ICT-2011-7-287351) evaluated motor capabilities in stroke patients during the recovery treatment period. We developed wearable sensing platform based on the sensor fusion among inertial, knitted piezoresistive sensors and textile EMG electrodes. The device was conceived in modular form and consists of a separate shirt, trousers, glove, and shoe. Thanks to the novel fusion approach it has been possible to develop a model for the shoulder taking into account the scapulo-thoracic joint of the scapular girdle, considerably improving the estimation of the hand position in reaching activities. In order to minimize the sensor set used to monitor gait, a single inertial sensor fused with a textile goniometer proved to reconstruct the orientation of all the body segments of the leg. Finally, the sensing glove, endowed with three textile goniometers and three force sensors showed good capabilities in the reconstruction of grasping activities and evaluating the interaction of the hand with the environment, according to the project specifications. This paper reports on the design and the technical evaluation of the performance of the sensing platform, tested on healthy subjects

A bi-articular model for scapular-humeral rhythm reconstruction through data from wearable sensors

Patient-specific performance assessment of arm movements in daily life activities is fundamental for neurological rehabilitation therapy. In most applications, the shoulder movement is simplified through a socket-ball joint, neglecting the movement of the scapular-thoracic complex. This may lead to significant errors. We propose an innovative bi-articular model of the human shoulder for estimating the position of the hand in relation to the sternum. The model takes into account both the scapular-toracic and gleno-humeral movements and their ratio governed by the scapular-humeral rhythm, fusing the information of inertial and textile-based strain sensors

Evaluation of wearable KPF goniometers in knee flexion-extension measurement for daily-life applications

Rehabilitation for stroke survivor is an important activity to recover daily-life functional performances. A daily life monitoring system composed of different subsystem was de- veloped within the INTERACTION EU project. Sensing trousers using a couple of IMUs integrated on the thighs and shanks and a textile goniometers in the knee region was designed to detect kinematic asymmetries between affected and unaffected legs in gait/ambulation. In this study we compared the performances of our textile goniometer based on KPF materials with a couple of IMUs for the evaluation of knee flexion-extension. We used a statistical approach (T-student test) to verify that the signal gathered from the goniometer has the same information of the one extracted from the IMUs. These results demonstrate a reliable per- formance of our sensors, which have the advantage to be more flexible, lighter and less expensive than current wear- able technologies