A real-time, multimodal biofeedback system for stroke patient rehabilitation

Abstract

This paper presents a novel real-time, multi-modal biofeedback system for stoke patient therapy. The problem is important as traditional mechanisms of rehabilitation are monotonous, and do not incorporate detailed quantitative assessment of recovery in addition to traditional clinical schemes. We have been working on developing an experiential media system that integrates task dependent physical therapy and cognitive stimuli within an interactive, multimodal environment. The environment provides a purposeful, engaging, visual and auditory scene in which patients can practice functional therapeutic reaching tasks, while receiving different types of simultaneous feedback indicating measures of both performance and results. There are two contributions of this paper - (a) identification of features and goals for the functional task, (b) the development of sophisticated feedback (auditory and visual) mechanisms that match the semantics of action of the task.