doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7723-1_P159

ABSTRACT

Rehabilitation is generally performed by a physical therapist or an occupational therapist in a hospital or rehabilitation facility. Recently, the number of therapists has been insufficient because the number of elderly people has increased. In rehabilitation, therapists pay special attention not only to individual postures but also to the movement between two sequential postures. This paper describes a robot system to help with the instruction of rehabilitation processes. The instruction robot not only can show a patient how to perform an exercise, but also can evaluate the accuracy of the patient's exercise. In addition, the robot advises the patient how to correct his/her posture if the exercise is incorrect. The robot indirectly evaluates the patient's posture by superimposing division areas of space in camera views of the patient. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the movement of an exercising patient during rehabilitation. The accuracy of the patient's movement is evaluated by the transition and speed of the patient’s body part passing through the division areas. In the evaluation experiments, the system was able to give advice with an accuracy rate of 76.3%.

Keywords: Rehabilitation, Instruction robot, Posture evaluation, Motion evaluation, Image processing.

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