remote exercise sessions at home or community centres, as a mean to maintaining
health and prevent illness. Table 1 presents essential information on the Service.
Table 1. Service description, based on the Persona Remote Rehabilitation Service [11].
Name LUL Telerehabilitation Service with Multimodal Interaction
Description
(What)
Remote and supervised exercise sessions at home or community centres, for
maintaining health and prevent illness. Sessions carried out concurrently at
several sites via networked multimodal applications.
It should be possible for the user to wear biosensors while doing the
exercises/rehabilitation. Eventual use of vibration or similar to give feedback
(ex: to indicate wrong/right execution of the exercise). A health professional
supervises everything from the training centre/hospital, including the
biosensors signals captured remotely and the (multiple) cameras images. The
system also includes mechanisms to request and process information regarding
effort level from the user.
End user People taking rehabilitation sessions at home and people wanting to do exercise
in case it is just training sessions.
Stackeholders
and Roles
(Who)
Health/Sport professionals (physiotherapists, gerontologists, etc) who
configures the sessions and directs them.
The training centre or other health services provider, which should install and
maintain the platform.
Technological
description
(How)
The main user interface is a large size computer monitor (acting as a large size
TV) combined with speakers and video cameras. In addition, it should be
possible to use a set of biosensors. Sensors gather the vital signals from the
patient and send them to the health professional.
Table 2. Analysis of our system according to AMITUDE properties.
Application Type Home rehabilitation system for elderly people. Physician supervision. Agent
based system with context-enabled functionalities.
Modalities Input, health professional: 2D analogue haptics pointing, 2D static
Portuguese typed text, Portuguese spoken conversation.
Output, health professional: Portuguese spoken conversation, Video
imaging, 2D static Portuguese typed text.
Input, elderly user: 2D static Portuguese typed text, Portuguese spoken
conversation, Video Streaming
Output, elderly user: 2D static Portuguese typed text, Portuguese spoken
conversation, 3D dynamic graphics describing exercises and involved
routines.
Interaction Two-way communication (deliberate). Computer-mediated human-human
communication.
User task, other
activity, domain
Task goal: execute a telerehabilitation session
Generic task: complete a session of rehabilitation exercises according to a
defined program, with direct supervision from a professional (ex: physician)
Domain: e-Health
Issues: Context-aware environment, customization
User (Personas) Elderly user. See the description of the Personas in next section.
Devices Input, elderly user: microphone and speech recognition, video camera,
biosensors, context-aware sensors.
Output, elderly user: loudspeaker and text-to-speech, large graphics display.
Input, health professional: microphone and speech recognition, keyboard,
mouse and touch-enabled graphics monitor.
Output, health professional: loudspeakers, graphical display.
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