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Review
. 2020 Jul 22;20(15):4063.
doi: 10.3390/s20154063.

Sensors and Systems for Physical Rehabilitation and Health Monitoring-A Review

Lucas Medeiros Souza do Nascimento  1 , Lucas Vacilotto Bonfati  1 , Melissa La Banca Freitas  1 , José Jair Alves Mendes Junior  2 , Hugo Valadares Siqueira  1 , Sergio Luiz Stevan Jr  1
Affiliations
Review

Sensors and Systems for Physical Rehabilitation and Health Monitoring-A Review

Lucas Medeiros Souza do Nascimento et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

The use of wearable equipment and sensing devices to monitor physical activities, whether for well-being, sports monitoring, or medical rehabilitation, has expanded rapidly due to the evolution of sensing techniques, cheaper integrated circuits, and the development of connectivity technologies. In this scenario, this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of sensors and systems for rehabilitation and health monitoring. Although we know the increasing importance of data processing techniques, our focus was on analyzing the implementation of sensors and biomedical applications. Although many themes overlap, we organized this review based on three groups: Sensors in Healthcare, Home Medical Assistance, and Continuous Health Monitoring; Systems and Sensors in Physical Rehabilitation; and Assistive Systems.

Keywords: e-health systems; physical rehabilitation; sensors; systems.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Most recurrent terms provided by VOSviewer bibliometrics software within the following keywords: Sensors and System to Rehabilitation and Caring People with Disabilities.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Recurrence proportions of the six terms linked to the keyword “sensor” used to delimit the research results in the IEEE, Science Direct, and PubMed databases from January 2014 to March 2020. This bibliometric analysis was obtained based on more than 13,500 occurrences.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Incidence rate (%) about sensors and techniques found in the IEEE, Science Direct, and PubMed databases using the terms related to the area of Sensors and Systems to Rehabilitation and Caring People with Disabilities, since January 2014 to March 2020.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Health 4.0 concepts: IoT and new measurement technologies make the customizing of health possible. Monitoring of patients or athletes is integrated by cloud computing, data collection, and sending it to servers connected to doctors, hospitals, or health professionals. Each sensor can behave as a thing (using IoT concept), and a body area network (BAN) is responsible for communicating with the network (the sensors in contact with the subject or data to the server). This process can occur online.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Wearable sensors on patients and environmental monitoring can identify emergencies that trigger only medical care and are directly linked to hospitals and clinics, or connected to a local help network for faster first aid.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Different sensors can be used in the rehabilitation process. To illustrate this, an inertial sensor can be placed on the patient’s ankle (a), while the same inertial sensor can be installed in the arm and forearm (b). FSR can also be used to measure foot plantar pressure (c).
Figure 7
Figure 7
Different sensors can be used in the assistive systems. To illustrate this, a wheelchair is shown with different applications: Prosthetics with sEMG sensor; Glasses with sEMG and EOG sensors; Devices to monitoring vital signs as ECG, and Inertial sensors to monitoring the user’s movements and wheelchair movements.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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