Telemedicine system for game-based rehabilitation of stroke patients in the FP7-“StrokeBack” project

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 exceeds 3% of their entire healthcare expenditure, including inpatient treatments, outpatient hospital visits and long-term rehabilitation and care1 Therefore, there is an urgent need for devising an effective long-term care and rehabilitation strategy for stroke patients, which would actively involve patients in the rehabilitation process while minimizing costly human support. This paper reports on the results of the FP7-StrokeBack project where game-based training system has been proposed allowing physicians to supervise the rehabilitation of patents at home. The proposed approach empowers the patients and their caretakers for effective application of rehabilitation protocols in their home settings, while leading physicians are enabled to supervise the progress of the rehabilitation (and intervene if needed) through the use of Personal Health Record (PHR) system. The increased rehabilitation speed and ability to perform training at home directly improves quality of life of patients.