ETD

• accelerometer
• embedded
• gyroscope
• imu
• mems
• real time
• telerehabilitation

The growing number of elderly people, in a progressively aging population, is driving the demand for increased resources to meet health care needs. Medical advances have enabled the population to remain in good health longer than in the past, however skeletal system disease is still very common, and as a result, prosthetic surgery is a common surgical intervention. Patients undergoing this surgery need post hospitalization, rehabilitative care, and in some cases, this can be a long term necessity; however it is not necessarily always easy to achieve. The implementation of technologies such as telerehabilitation could potentially be the answer to this problem. Innovative technologies such as this would allow patients to be quickly dismissed from hospital, while still being monitored, and provided with constant medical and professional supervision . The diffusion of efficient, flexible, easy to use and economical telerehabilitation systems, would lead to a number of advantages, both for the patient and the hospital structure. The aim of this thesis is to design and implement a wireless low cost portable device prototype aimed at knee telerehabilitation and to investigate a possible scheme of a cloud-based infrastructure on which the device will rely to store medical data and will allows doctors and physiotherapists to follow the patients and to promptly take the right actions in case the device reports critical situations. Results show that a wireless low cost, non-invasive device, based on a couple of Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) can achieve a precision of about 1 degree in the context of knee flexion/extension angle measurement.