XoRehab: IoT Enabled Wheelchair based Lower Limb Rehabilitation System

IoT in healthcare brought a technological revolution in rehabilitation, enabling the patients to get rehabilitation in the comfort of their home, while being supervised remotely by the professionals. IoT enabled rehabilitation ensures a best possible way towards recovery, without inflicting further injuries. It also allows customization of rehabilitation plan based on the patient profile and progress, while helping in defining their personalised milestones. The main contribution of this paper is a novel wheelchair based IoT enabled ‘XoRehab", exoskeleton for rehabilitation; a device for lower limb, with a backrest mechanism. This involves development of a well-trained robot based on electromechanical actuation with micro-controller and feedback system, which can replace the physical trainer or physiotherapist. This autonomous device will control speed of flexion and extension on patient’s limbs to improve efficiency of the treatment. It also provides repetitive motion of flexion and extension. The edge system design to upload local rehabilitation data and logs to the cloud server is presented. We propose an opensource Elasticsearch Logstash Kibana (ELK) stack for providing the cloud services, which is a scalable solution. The design of the developed prototype has been discussed in detail along with the functional test results.Clinical Relevance— The introduction of well-trained exoskeleton in the rehabilitation process, gives a high level of performance in patient recovery, and it contributes to expeditious restoration of their joints and improvement in muscle and nerve system