| dc.description.abstract | In Taiwan, physical therapists are usually lack of the experiences of adopting computerized evaluation systems to provide patients with objective measurements and assessments. Most of the rehabilitation professionals usually adopt the visual evaluations incorporated with a chart so that the assessment will be prone to be imprecise and subjective. Therefore, rehabilitation specialists encounter the problem of being unable to objectively assess the treatment effect after each individual course of treatment. This thesis proposes a computerized physical therapy evaluation system which is able to provide physical therapists with precise evaluations about patients’ physical conditions. Based on the evaluation outputs from the proposed evaluation system, rehabilitation professionals can diagnose the reasons of pains or movement dysfunctions and then provide patients with a customized rehabilitation exercise treatment program.
The system consists of three sub-systems: the balance evaluation sub-system, the range of joint motion evaluation sub-system, and the coordination evaluation sub-system. The balance evaluation sub-system adopts a Wii Balance Board to measure the static and dynamic standing balances. It provides physical therapists with the information about the trajectories of the center of pressure and some quantitative indices about balance. In addition, a balance game is designed to promote patients’ interests in practicing the assigned rehabilitation exercises. As for the remaining two sub-systems, a Kinect sensor is adopted to measure the ranges of some joint motions (e.g., back, shoulder, wrist, and thumb) and the degree of coordination (e.g., finger to nose test). For each different evaluation assignment, a specific image processing algorithm was developed to process either the depth information or the skeletal tracking information to achieve the goal of evaluation. For the time being, the proposed evaluation system was tested in a laboratory setting. In the future, some pilot trials at hospitals will be carried out to test the performance of the system. | en_US |