Physio@Home: Designing and Exploring Visual Guidance and Feedback Techniques for At-home Rehabilitation

Date
2015-09-25
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Abstract
Physiotherapy patients learn rehabilitation exercises with the help of a physiotherapist, but are at risk of re-injury while exercising at home. This thesis explores the design of visualizations for guiding patients through physiotherapy exercises at home. I interviewed a physiotherapist to gain knowledge on physiotherapy practices and developed a set of visual characteristics for guidance: plane/range of movement, positions/angles to maintain, extent of movement, and rate of movement. I applied these in the design of movement-guiding visualizations in two prototypes. Zipples was a Microsoft Kinect-based prototype featuring movement recording and playback, supported by a variety of visualizations. Physio@Home was a Vicon-based iteration that featured an annotation tool, an iteratively-designed Wedge visualization, and multiple camera perspectives. I evaluated both systems with laboratory studies and found that participants using Physio@Home could follow exercises with greater accuracy than watching and mimicking video. I conclude with reflections on system limitations and potential future work.
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Keywords
Rehabilitation and Therapy, Computer Science
Citation
Tang, R. (2015). Physio@Home: Designing and Exploring Visual Guidance and Feedback Techniques for At-home Rehabilitation (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27355