Humanoid assessing rehabilitative exercises

This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on "New Methodologies for Patients Rehabilitation".

The article presents the approach in which the rehabilitative exercise prepared by healthcare professional is encoded as formal knowledge and used by humanoid robot to assist patients without involving other care actors.

The main objective is the use of humanoids in rehabilitative care. An example is pulmonary rehabilitation in COPD patients. Another goal is the automated judgment functionality to determine how the rehabilitation exercise matches the pre-programmed correct sequence.

We use the Aldebaran Robotics' NAO humanoid to set up artificial cognitive application. Pre-programmed NAO induces elderly patient to undertake humanoid-driven rehabilitation exercise, but needs to evaluate the human actions against the correct template. Patient is observed using NAO's eyes. We use the Microsoft Kinect SDK to extract motion path from the humanoid's recorded video. We compare human- and humanoid-operated process sequences by using the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and test the prototype.

This artificial cognitive software showcases the use of DTW algorithm to enable humanoids to judge in near real-time about the correctness of rehabilitative exercises performed by patients following the robot's indications.

One could enable better sustainable rehabilitative care services in remote residential settings by combining intelligent applications piloting humanoids with the DTW pattern matching algorithm applied at run time to compare humanoid- and human-operated process sequences. In turn, it will lower the need of human care.