ARhT (Automated Relearning hand Therapy) is a portable hand therapy system that enables a user to perform physical therapy at the comfort of their own home. Introduced at the recent IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society Conference by Bercht et al, the system reduces rehabilitation time, enhances the user experience, reduces cost and provides accountability to physical therapy sessions. ARhT complements traditional therapy methods by interacting with the user in real time and providing the patient user friendly instructions, feedback, and progress tracking. The therapist pre-selects the hand gestures that comprise every workout and can view session information on a patient to patient basis within a standalone web application. ARhT incorporates a data acquisition subsystem which houses EMG sensors and a custom computation and communication board. The sensor data is transmitted to an Android smartphone that determines the user performance and interacts with the user through a graphical user interface. Our results show that our system recognises hand therapy gestures with over 95% accuracy.
We look forward to hearing more about this system!