Design strategies to improve patient motivation during robot-aided rehabilitation

BACKGROUND: Motivation is an important factor in rehabilitation and frequently used as a determinant of rehabilitation outcome. Several factors can influence patient motivation and so improve exercise adherence. This paper presents the design of two robot devices for use in the rehabilitation of upper limb movements, that can motivate patients during the execution of the assigned motor tasks by enhancing the gaming aspects of rehabilitation. In addition, a regular review of the obtained performance can reinforce in patients' minds the importance of exercising and encourage them to continue, so improving their motivation and consequently adherence to the program. In view of this, we also developed an evaluation metric that could characterize the rate of improvement and quantify the changes in the obtained performance. METHODS: Two groups (G1, n = 8 and G2, n = 12) of patients with chronic stroke were enrolled in a 3-week rehabilitation program including standard physical therapy (45 min. daily) plus treatment by means of robot devices (40 min., twice daily) respectively for wrist (G1) and elbow-shoulder movements (G2). Both groups were evaluated by means of standard clinical assessment scales and the new robot measured evaluation metric. Patients' motivation was assessed in 9/12 G2 patients by means of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) questionnaire. RESULTS: Both groups reduced their motor deficit and showed a significant improvement in clinical scales and the robot measured parameters. The IMI assessed in G2 patients showed high scores for interest, usefulness and importance subscales and low values for tension and pain subscales. CONCLUSION: Thanks to the design features of the two robot devices the therapist could easily adapt training to the individual by selecting different difficulty levels of the motor task tailored to each patient's disability. The gaming aspects incorporated in the two rehabilitation robots helped maintain patients' interest high during execution of the assigned tasks by providing feedback on performance. The evaluation metric gave a precise measure of patients' performance and thus provides a tool to help therapists promote patient motivation and hence adherence to the training program

Determination of the acceptable MPEG-4 quality for clinical real-time tele-echocardiography services

The characteristics of Moving Picture experts Group (MPEG-4) video compression, in particular its adaptability to narrowband channels and the elevated degree of compression obtainable, make it of interest for services of telemedicine that require instantaneous video transmission and interpretation. In this study we faced the problem of the minimum quality of service (QoS) in specific applications of tele-echocardiography (T-E). In the specifics we evaluated the clinical adequacy of MpEG-4 compression in the real time transmission of echocardiographic studies. Forty echocardiographic examinations consisting of standard projections of patients affected by ischemic heart disease were submitted to two observers expert in echocardiography, who made 4 separate evaluations as follows: 2 on the same equipment on which the original studies were performed; 1 after online MpEG-4 codification of the studies at 256 kb/s; 1 after online MpEG-4 codification of the studies at 128 kb/s. For each evaluation, the following data were collected: subjective opinion on the overall visual quality of the images; estimate of ejection fraction and level of impairment; wall Motion Score Index and percentage of asynergy; mitral failure. The results: 1) the subjective quality of the echocardiographic images was the same as that perceived in the video at Mpeg4/256 kb/s compression level while it was lower, as expected, in the video Mpeg4/128 kb/s; 2) the quality degradation did not produce a statistically significant difference in the evaluation of left ventricular function and regional wall motion impairments. these results confirm the feasibility of MpEG-4 compression for the transmission of echocardiographic studies for use in telemedicine and suggest that it is not necessary to seek transmission speeds higher than 256 kb/s for the semiquantitative reading of left venticular kinetics