Implementation of tele-rehabilitation system combined with video call center

Abstract

Japan's low birthrate and rapidly aging population are causing medical expenses to take up ever more of the national budget and leading to a shortage of young medical professionals. As a result, rehabilitation therapy is being shifted from hospital-care to home-care. Several other countries will also face the same situation in the near future. Thus, we propose a tele-rehabilitation system combined with a video call center to make up for the shortage of rehabilitation therapy done by visiting physiotherapists. A video call center operator coaches a patient instead of a physiotherapist, and a physiotherapist supervises multiple operators. The system focuses on cerebrovascular patients who have a home-visit rehabilitation or an outpatient one and uses Microsoft KINECT to measure strain of the upper body. In this paper, implementation of this system is mainly described.