Construction of an AI System for the Automatic Supervision of Shoulder's Rehabilitation Exercises (Rehab-SPIA)

The current historical phase and the growing need for rehabilitation in the world make tele-rehabilitation systems, and e-Health in general, fundamental tools for increasing patient engagement and compliance with care, crucial elements for the preservation of the NHS from a perspective expenditure review and resource optimization .

In particular, the rehabilitation patient has on average an adherence to the Home Exercise Program (HEP) between 30-50%, to which is frequently added a reduced effectiveness of motor learning due to the lack of feedback on the accuracy of the gesture, as it happens in the hospital or outpatient setting under the supervision of a therapist.

The new computational approaches for the analysis of data on human movement, aimed at the development of algorithms to automatically supervise the accuracy of the patient's gesture during the exercise of home self-treatment, attempt to solve this last critical issue.

Among the most promising approaches are those based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), in particular those of the latest generation, called sub-symbolic (or connectionist).

These algorithms arouse a lot of interest for their ability to automatically extract the salient properties of the movement, reducing the intervention of experts to the collection of all the data, and to the possible labeling of the examples (5) In any case, the literature shows a lack of models developed with the direct involvement of clinicians and a scarcity of data sets created with patient populations.

Furthermore, most of the models present in the literature have been created using numerous input devices, often with a high technological rate with considerable costs for implementing a possible service at the patient's home.

For these reasons we want to create a specialist clinical dataset, starting only from the videos of the exercises, involving specific populations by pathology and built on the basis of clinical judgment. With these characteristics, this project aims to automate the motion analysis process as much as possible, enormously reducing the costs deriving from the use of technologies and minimizing human error, all by exploiting the most recent computational approaches in order to create a useful and low-cost tool for home functional re-education.

Given the importance of the Home Exercise Program in shoulder disease, it was decided to select a population of patients affected by the main pathologies affecting this joint.

The main objective of the study is to create and validate a software tool for the automatic and expert analysis of the correct execution of the main rehabilitation exercises for the functional recovery of the shoulder following orthopedic pathologies.