Real-Time Compliant Stream Processing Agents for Physical Rehabilitation

Stroke rehabilitation: from diagnosis to therapy

Stroke remains a significant global health burden, necessitating comprehensive and innovative approaches in rehabilitation to optimize recovery outcomes. This paper provides a thorough exploration of rehabilitation strategies in stroke management, focusing on diagnostic methods, acute management, and diverse modalities encompassing physical, occupational, speech, and cognitive therapies. Emphasizing the importance of early identification of rehabilitation needs and leveraging technological advancements, including neurostimulation techniques and assistive technologies, this manuscript highlights the challenges and opportunities in stroke rehabilitation. Additionally, it discusses future directions, such as personalized rehabilitation approaches, neuroplasticity concepts, and advancements in assistive technologies, which hold promise in reshaping the landscape of stroke rehabilitation. By delineating these multifaceted aspects, this manuscript aims to provide insights and directions for optimizing stroke rehabilitation practices and enhancing the quality of life for stroke survivors.

Potential of digitalization within physiotherapy: a comparative survey

Background

Due to the global digitalization, implementation of digital elements into daily work can support physiotherapists’ work but may also pose some challenges. Only little is known about physiotherapists’ attitude towards digitalization. This study primarily aimed to analyze physiotherapists’ attitude towards digitalization and to what extend digital tools have been implemented into their daily work. In second analysis, participants’ characteristics such as age, working place, gender and mode of survey participation were assessed.

Methods

A 12-main-item survey amongst voluntary course participants of one physiotherapeutic training center was conducted via paper-based as well as online questionnaires between July 2018 and June 2019 including questions on participants’ general as well as particular attitude towards digitalization, the use of (mobile) applications and possible advantages and disadvantages of the ongoing digital transformation. Sub-analysis was performed for age (≤40 years versus > 40 years), gender, mode of participation (paper vs. online) and working place (practice vs. hospital).

Results

Overall, 488 physiotherapists participated in the survey. In comparison of the age groups, younger participants had more concerns about data security (p = 0.042) and insufficient financial remuneration (p < 0.001). Younger participants stated higher satisfaction with data literacy than their counterparts (p = 0.0001). Physiotherapists working in the outpatient sector, rather than in hospitals, expected digitalization to increase more in relevance (p < 0.001). The online respondents (OG) indicated that they had more knowledge about key aspects of the current legal situation regarding digitalization than participants completing the paper-based survey (p = 0.002). 50.4% of the considered digitalization as useful for their job.

Conclusions

The majority of participants saw high potential for digitalization in the physiotherapy sector. Younger physiotherapists seem to be more concerned about data security and insufficient financial remuneration. Physiotherapists in the outpatient sector seem to see more potential in digital transformations. General concerns like missing reimbursement, lack of data security or knowledge on legal frameworks should be addressed in the future. Further studies should focus on identifying specific digital tools which can support physiotherapists.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-022-07931-5.

A Multi-Agent System for Data Fusion Techniques Applied to the Internet of Things Enabling Physical Rehabilitation Monitoring

There are more than 800 million people in the world with chronic diseases. Many of these people do not have easy access to healthcare facilities for recovery. Telerehabilitation seeks to provide a solution to this problem. According to the researchers, the topic has been treated as medical aid, making an exchange between technological issues such as the Internet of Things and virtual reality. The main objective of this work is to design a distributed platform to monitor the patient’s movements and status during rehabilitation exercises. Later, this information can be processed and analyzed remotely by the doctor assigned to the patient. In this way, the doctor can follow the patient’s progress, enhancing the improvement and recovery process. To achieve this, a case study has been made using a PANGEA-based multi-agent system that coordinates different parts of the architecture using ubiquitous computing techniques. In addition, the system uses real-time feedback from the patient. This feedback system makes the patients aware of their errors so that they can improve their performance in later executions. An evaluation was carried out with real patients, achieving promising results.