The R&D European project FitRehab, participating by Barcelona Digital, will facilitate the rehabilitation of chronic patients and old or disabled people using virtual reality and being remotely monitored by clinicians.
The objective is to improve the quality of life of patients and reduce relapses which may occur during traditional rehabilitation processes. Thus, FitRehab will create a platform with two integrated workstations. The first, developed by Barcelona Digital, will be used by medical staff to program personalized patient exercise. The second will be used by patients from home to perform the exercises with a virtual coach. The patient will be controlled by sensors located on a t-shirt created specifically for this purpose.
Besides the movement sensors, the patient’s t-shirt will have integrated biological sensors to monitor their physiological variables, such as heart rate, temperature and respiration. The information collected by all the sensors will be sent to the hospital workstation, where medical staff will analyze it and will modify the program if needed. Thus, the patient condition always will be under medical control and supervision.
The project, with a budget of over 460.000€, is funded by the European Union, within the Innovation for Welfare program, and will end in 2012. Participates companies and healthcare and research centres of Catalonia (Spain), Austria, Nord Brabant (Netherlands), Lombardy (Italy) and Tartu (Estonia).