Architecture for Groupware Oriented to Collaborative Medical Activities in the Rehabilitation of Strokes

Abstract

When a person suffers a stroke, they require rehabilitation to recover from the consequences caused by this event. In order to carry out the rehabilitation, a multidisciplinary team of specialists intervenes, providing care from diverse areas such as neurology, nutrition, psychology, and physiotherapy. In the rehabilitation process, physicians interact with medical computing software and devices. The interactions represent medical activities that follow rehabilitation. However, there is no clear conception of how specialists coordinate to carry out medical activities. There are no specific communication channels that allow multidisciplinary collaboration for complete rehabilitation. This paper presents a systematic review of the state of the art that addresses this problem. On the other hand, a collaborative software architecture is proposed to support this area, which allows the monitoring medical activities from human-computer multimodal interactions. The architecture is composed of 3 layers: (1) to perceive the interactions and to monitor the activities, (2) to control the multidisciplinary access and share the information, and (3) to analyze and evaluate the execution of the multidisciplinary activities. Evaluating how the activities are carried out will help the physicians make decisions regarding the execution of the treatment plan. Therefore, we propose an activities representation diagram that facilitates this evaluation. Finally, we developed a prototype with a user-centered design that perceives human-computer interactions supported by the architecture.