Five Vadodara engineers developed a working system for Physical Rehabilitation of heart stroke patients
Helping them to recover faster with the help of Artificial Intelligence
Developing countries like India account for more than four-fifths of all strokes. The stroke incidence rate in India is much higher than in other developing countries with approximately 1.8 million Indians out of a population of 1.2 billion suffering from heart stroke every year and the biggest problem faced is the numbers of registered physiotherapy clinics are very less resulting in inadequate health services being available for the needy.
While the situation in rural areas are even worse as they are unable to receive basic health care services. This problem further leads to reduction in the required session time to a patient by a physiotherapist as they often alternate between patients, this causes prolonged recovery time. Furthermore, human errors tend to affect the assessment results and errors which occur due to the misalignment or improper calibration of machines adds to the problem.
Rehab is such a important part after any surgery which decides the physical well being of the patients afterwards. Particularly in heart surgeries the post operative sessions are very important as it helps the patients to heal and move towards a healthier life.
To make the rehab more accurate and helpful five engineering graduates, Vedant Jain (Age - 22), Tanmay Vakare (Age - 22), Apurva Desai (Age - 22), Kshitij Verma (Age - 22), Vraj Patel (Age - 22) developed a device under their startup venture Rehabo Technologies. They have developed a working system for Physical Rehabilitation of heart stroke patients helping them to recover in a faster, cheaper and better manner with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
Their mission is to emancipate patients by empowering Physiotherapist and Patients with the help of technology. They are incubated at “GTU Innovation and Startup Center – Vadodara” and received the financial and incubation support in March 2019. They also received Dewang Mehta IT Award for Year 2019-20 for their innovation.
Vadodara Based Venture named as Rehabo Technologies developed a product that aims for rehabilitation of stroke patients by a game that can aid the process of physiotherapy.
"By understanding how the physical movements of a heart stroke victim differ to a non-victim, we built an application for motion sensor device that can record a body movement twice, and compare each action. Thereby they created a fun game to differ from regular physiotherapy and provide positive feedback for motivational purposes. It simulates physiotherapy in a heart stroke rehabilitation situation using the motion sensor and game. We developed a system that detects and evaluates physical therapy exercises using motion sensors. We have proposed algorithm with the help of Artificial intelligence detects all the occurrences of one or more template signals (Repetitive exercises)," said Vedant Jain a computer engineer.
Looking all the problems being faced by health care providers and patients, society deserves a revolutionary solution.
"This system plays a vital role in providing proper monitoring to the patients by giving them the required attention, environment and facilitating them with the individual care.
Moreover, the system helps in boosting the recovery time by detecting the exact area of problem and providing the accurate exercises and the number of repetitions needed. This helps in reaching out to patients in remote areas and regions where physiotherapy is not accessible. Also, the cost effectiveness makes the system reliable. The system is provided on rental basis to patients so that it is easily accessible and thus makes it cost effective," added Jain.
He further said the managerial capability of the physiotherapists increases as they can monitor the progress of more patients at a time. Lastly, the system inculcates a feature of data storage which allows the patients to self-assess themselves. The Reports generated by the system can be accessed by physiotherapists even remotely and the progress of the patients is tracked effectively even from thousand miles.
The prototype costs around 4500 and total package will cost around 15,000 for the people. The product is still in developing stages and with modifications the boys are planning to launch it later on in the year. They also plans to approach yoga classes, sports academies and military to conduct demos and briefed them about the benefits. They also plan to develop a mobile application for the device.
In their words this system has come up with a revolutionary technique to aid the physiotherapy patients to achieve their optimal strength and to recover fast.
