Background: Physical therapy treatment has gradually become important in hospitals. This paper focused on elbow joint rehabilitation, as this form of rehabilitation is used most often. Moreover, most elbow joint rehabilitation programs could be conducted at home without going to a medical institution, which will economize medical manpower.
Objective: How to judge the correct rehabilitation motion becomes an issue for elbow joint rehabilitation at home. Therefore, this study proposed a residential elbow joint rehabilitation system (REJRS) by smartphone with a cloud database to address these issues.
Methods: REJRS has the ability to judge the correct motions and times of rehabilitation in real time. When the rehabilitation motions are incorrect, the number of rehabilitation repetitions is insufficient, or a timed rehabilitation session is insufficient, the patient will receive a warning text and light alert by REJRS. Then, the data of rehabilitation sessions are uploaded to the cloud database immediately.
Results: Patients can query their rehabilitation data at all times. Moreover, medical staff can track the status of each patient's rehabilitation at any time and any place by downloading the data from the cloud database via the Internet. In our experimental results, the rate for detecting the correct elbow joint rehabilitation motion was up to 90%.
Conclusions: The results show that REJRS could be applied for residential elbow joint rehabilitation. In the future, REJRS will be verified by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for application to clinical treatment.
Keywords: Physical therapy treatment; clinical treatment; cloud database; elbow joint rehabilitation; institutional review board; smartphone.