ABOUT REWIRE


Rewire-project structure
REWIRE project proposes to develop, integrate and field test an innovative virtual reality based rehabilitation platform, aimed at allowing patients, discharged from the hospital, to continue intensive rehabilitation at home under remote monitoring by the hospital itself. The main idea is to assemble off the self components in a robust and reliable way to get a system to be deployed massively at the patients’ homes, enabling home-based effective rehabilitation to improve disabilities and functions.

The platform would be constituted of three hierarchical levels:

  • PATIENT STATION (PS). It is installed at patient's home. It is is based on video-tracking and virtual reality: the patient sees on the TV display himself or an avatar moving and interacting in real-time with a virtual game. Game variety of scenarios, balanced scoring system, quantitative exercise evaluation, audio-visual feed-back aim at the maximum patient’s motivation. A robust and reliable auto-calibration and spatial synchronization with the graphics will be developed. Patient’s daily activity would be monitored by a Body Sensor Network and his activity profiled. Besides, environmental, physiological and motion data are combined to tune the rehabilitation exercises level to the proper level of challenge level and are used to asses potential risks. 
  • HOSPITAL STATION (HS). It is used at the hospitals by the clinical staff to schedule a program of exercises personalized to each patient. Its main role is to define, schedule, monitor and tune the rehabilitation program to be made at home. It will take into account the motion data and the data of the interaction with the virtual environment items collected while the patient is in the hospital and at home. HS main role is being a theraphy management tool with advanced capabilities for the therapist and being a central communication point for the other stations. The HS will work as a web application with two main views:
    • The therapist/clinician view that will provide tools for remote prescription, monitoring and analysis of the rehabilitation treatments.
    • The patient's view that will provide access to information resources on their pathologies, offering counselling, and interact with other patients, using web 2.0 tools (virtual community of the patients themselves) building a social network with the objective of decreasing the isolation of patients while doing rehabilitation at home.
         The HS has also the role to analyse the outcome of the rehabilitation session, both in the short and long term, which allows therapist and clinicians to analyze the degree of success and failure in the rehabilitation process, risks and evolution pattern, providing a solid ground for a more effective planning of rehabilitation.
 
  • NETWORKING STATION (NS). It is installed at the regional level (health provider site). It will allow to collect valuable data related to rehabilitation while the patient is in the hospital and at home. Its role will be to analyse, interpret and use the multi-parametric data that come from its associated hospitals and are related to the individual patients' day by day rehabilitation in a collective manner. These data, organized into different patients populations can create valuable new and improved knowledge, and it will allow to discover common features and trends of rehabilitation treatments among hospitals and regions.Thus by using the NS, researchers and health service officials have access to data that answers questions related to epidemiology, health care penetration and patient compliance.
        The NS will contribute to reach an active feedback to both the patient and the clinicians, by fostering continuous shared patient-doctor communication on the rehabilitation plan (multidisciplinary consultation and direct communication among specialists, general practitioners, therapists, informal caregivers and family). The patient community supported by the hospital will allow exchanging experiences and information among patients in order to maximize at all times patients' motivation and involvement.
 
        The REWIRE platform will collect a huge amount of valuable data on daily life activity and rehabilitation progression for all the patients served. The analysis of these data will offer to health providers the possibility to monitor after-stroke patient's evolution on a large scale, being able to anticipate trends and properly distribute their resources.