StrokeBack · Telemedicine System Empowering Stroke Patients to Fight Back

Stroke is a disease with very high socio-economic impact. In average the healthcare expenditure cost for Strokes across different countries in Europe and USA is 3% of their entire healthcare expenditure. This includes inpatient treatment cost, outpatient hospital visits and long-term rehabilitation and care. Analysis showed that costs of long-term care have increased from 13% to 49% of overall costs in average in recent years. Therefore there is an urgent need for devising an effective long-term care and rehabilitation strategy for Stroke patients, which will involve the patients actively in the process while minimising costly human intervention.The StrokeBack project intends to develop an automated remote rehabilitation system by blending advances of ICT and practical clinical knowledge that will empower the patients and their immediate carer for effective application of the rehabilitation protocol in home settings.StrokeBack will combine state-of-the-art monitoring devices forming a wireless Body Area Network that enable simultaneous measurement of multiple vital parameters and currently executed movements that are particularly of interest from a Stroke rehabilitation point of view. The measured parameters will be fused using advanced feature extraction and classification algorithms processed on-body, which will denote the accuracy of the executed exercise. The training parameters along with vital data will be stored in a patient health record to which the responsible clinicians and therapists have access so that they can dynamically update the rehabilitation program. By employing manual intervention only when actually necessary, it will eliminate costly human intervention and thereby significantly reduce the associated costs. The increased rehabilitation speed as well as the fact that the rehabilitation training can be done at home directly improves quality of life of patients. To sum up StrokeBack will increase rehabilitation speed while reducing cost.