HeartHealth: A Cardiovascular Disease Home-Based Rehabilitation System

Abstract

The increasing pressure on medical institutions around the world requires health care professionals to be prescribing homebased exercise rehabilitation treatments to empower patients to self-monitor their rehabilitation journey. Home-based exercise rehabilitation has shown to be highly effective in treating conditions such as Cardiovascular Disease (CVD). However, adherence to home-based exercise rehabilitation remains low. Possible causes for this are that patients are not monitored, they cannot be confident that they are performing the exercise correctly or accurately and they receive no feedback. This paper proposes HeartHealth, a novel patient-centric gamified exercise rehabilitation platform that can help address the issue of adherence to these programmes. The key functionality is the ability to record the patient movements and compare them against the exercises that have been prescribed in order to return feedback to the patient and to the health care professional, as well. In order to synthesize a compact fully operational system able to work in real life scenarios, tools and services from FI-PPP projects, FIWARE1 and FI-STAR2, were exploited and a new FI-STAR component, Motion Evaluation Specific Enabler (SE), was designed and developed. The HeartHealth system brings together real-time cloud-based motion evaluation coupled with accurate low-cost motion capture, a personalised exercise rehabilitation programme and an intuitive and fun serious game interface, designed specifically with a Cardiac Rehabilitation population in mind. View