A Virtual Assistant for Home Rehabilitation: the 2Vita-B Physical Project

Active rehabilitation is an exercise-based program meant to help people with motor disorders improve their function. The correctness of the exercise execution has a significant impact on the effectiveness of such programs. An improperly performed exercise may impair a patient’s health. In this context, we propose the 2Vita-B Physical system. The system can be intended as a virtual assistant able – on the one hand – to support the patient during a rehabilitation exercise, and – on the other hand – to support specialists (e.g., physiotherapists) in the management of the whole rehabilitation plans. Physiotherapists have the possibility of assigning to a patient a motor rehabilitation plan, i.e., a series of rehabilitative exercises. The patient, on the other hand, can count on the support of the system itself, which allows her to perform these exercises by offering real-time feedback on the correctness of the movements that, generally, would have been provided to her by the physiotherapist. The key component of the 2Vita-B Physical systems is represented by the intelligent motion tracking and analysis component, based on both machine learning techniques and the newly released Microsoft Azure Kinect.