Internet-Based Smartphone System for After-Stroke Hand Rehabilitation

Hand rehabilitation for after-stroke survived patients is crucial to be initiated very soon for good results in the recovery process. Traditional rehabilitation requires clinical supervision by a physiotherapist, so it can be costly, time consuming, and demotivating. This research suggests a low-cost online wearable hand rehabilitation system to support partially disabled patients with their hand rehabilitation. The proposed online system consists of two main parts, namely patient part, and therapist part. The patient part consists of a mobile phone app. and a Myo gesture control armband. The app. generates rehabilitation exercises and all other operations to help the patients do their exercises on their own with motivating graphics. Meanwhile, the Myo armband detects electromyographic (EMG) signals of patient's arm muscles and recognizes the gestures and movements of the hand. The system can classify these gestures and movements for correct and incorrect to track the patient's performance. On the other hand, the therapist part includes local performance and remote online monitoring portal for monitoring, analysis, and assessment of the patient's recovery progress. After completion of a given exercise, a performance report of the patient will be given locally and sent to the monitoring portal for assessment by the physiotherapist. The system was tested by healthy subjects to prove its efficiency with accuracy of 96.9%. The results showed a smooth performance and compatibility between the main two parts of the system.