Physio at Home - Exploring Visual Guidance and Feedback Techniques for At-home Rehabilitation

Richard Tang. (2015). Physio at Home - Exploring Visual Guidance and Feedback Techniques for At-home Rehabilitation.

Abstract

Physiotherapy patients learn exercises for rehabilitation with the help of a physiotherapist, but are at risk of re-injury while exercising alone at home. This thesis explores the design and usage of visualizations for guiding patients through physiotherapy exercises at home. I interviewed a practicing physiotherapist to gain knowledge on physiotherapy practices, and then developed a set of visual characteristics for movement guidance: plane/range of movement, positions/angles to maintain, extent of movement, and rate of movement. I applied these in the design of movement-guiding visualizations in two prototype systems: Zipples and Physio@Home. Zipples was a Microsoft Kinect-based prototype featuring robust movement recording and playback functionality, supported by a variety of visualizations. Physio@Home was a Vicon-based iteration that improved on Zipples with an annotation tool, an iteratively-designed Wedge visualization, and multiple camera perspectives. I evaluated both systems with laboratory studies to measure their effectiveness in having participants follow pre-recorded exercises. I conclude with findings from both systems and studies, and discuss potential areas for future work.

Materials

PDF File (http://hcitang.org/papers/2015-mscthesis-tang.pdf)

BibTeX

@mastersthesis{tang2015thesis,
  author = {Tang, Richard},
  title = {Physio at Home - Exploring Visual Guidance and Feedback
  Techniques for At-home Rehabilitation},
  school = {University of Calgary},
  year = {2015},
  month = jun,
  pdfurl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2015-mscthesis-tang.pdf},
  type = {thesis}
}