Renato Baptista and Enjie Ghorbel, pictured, are part of a team developing a rehabilitation app Mike Zenari

Renato Baptista and Enjie Ghorbel, pictured, are part of a team developing a rehabilitation app Mike Zenari

“We’re trying to develop an application for helping stroke survivors to exercise from home without the supervision of the therapist,” research associate Enjie Ghorbel tells Delano. “Usually, when someone has a stroke, they are obliged to do rehabilitation to recover activity.
At the beginning, they do rehabilitation with a therapist in a centre. In a second stage, the therapist gives the patient exercises to do from home. The problem is that you cannot check if the patient did the exercises, if he’s motivated, doing them correctly or compensating, which is not good because it can lead to injury.”

The self-training application uses a screen and camera, which, along with the software, help track patient movements as they work through physiotherapy exercises. “The patient sees themselves in a screen and sees a kind of skeleton over their body, on the screen,” the Tunisian national explains. Low-cost depth sensors in the camera monitor posture and movements, which the software corrects by highlighting the relevant body part in green, orange or red, based on the movement quality. “It’s all visual, so easily interpretable. And the good thing is that the data acquired is sent to the therapist, so he can check how much the patient exercises and if he did it correctly or not.”

The project itself is part of Starr, a programme of supporting collaborative research that supports self-management by stroke survivors to help reduce the chance of a second stroke from happening. Funded with €4.5m by the EU Horizon 2020 research programme, it is being developed by a consortium of research groups, stroke survivors, healthcare companies and hospitals, among others.

An international computer vision team at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), comprised of Ghorbel, Djamila Aouada, Abd El Rahman Shabayek and Renato Baptista, is working on the computer vision part of the application. It has already tested the prototype application on 20 people working at the SnT, as well as stroke patients at the Fondation Hopale, a recovery centre in France, and Osakidetza, the healthcare system in the Basque region of Spain. “The patients were very happy and described it as a very positive experience,” says Ghorbel. “When I saw the response of the patients, it was a very emotive moment.”

“The application can help clinicians to save time,” she says. “With the increase in the number of strokes worldwide because of our ageing population, we need to find solutions, because at a certain point, we won’t have enough qualified people.”

The four-year project will end in the coming months. Ghorbel and the team are now seeking funding to create a spin-off to bring the application to market. If successful, the treatment could one day be made available to patients at the Rehazenter, a specialist rehabilitation centre in Luxembourg.

This article was originally published in the September 2019 edition of Delano Magazine.