A Smart Solution for Proprioceptive Rehabilitation through M-IMU Sensors

The decrease of proprioception is a common consequence of neuromuscular and musculoskeletal diseases, and a rehabilitation treatment is needed to recover proprioceptive abilities. Many studies demonstrate that biofeedback training of sensory-motor functions can improve the outcome of rehabilitation. The combined use of biofeedback, wearable sensors and Internet of Things represents a very useful solution to develop smart wearable devices to be used for augmenting rehabilitation, both in clinics and at home. This paper proposes and validates a smart and easy-to-use system for proprioceptive training, which provides biofeedback to the patient thanks to a custom-designed Virtual Reality game. Attention is paid to reduce the complexity of the system and the amount of data to be exchanged for controlling the game and to be stored for assessing the patient's progresses, still ensuring the effectiveness of the system to monitor the patient also in home-rehabilitation scenarios. The system was experimentally validated on 8 healthy subjects and the obtained results demonstrated that the Virtual Reality game is easy and intuitive, as confirmed by the high performance of the subjects (success rate > 90%), and that allows training different features of limb proprioception.