Session S41.1

An Interactive Cardiac Tele-Rehabilitation Program Using a Mobile Device

X Chen, CT Ho*, ET Lim

Institute for Infocomm Research
Singapore, Singapore

Patients on the road to recovery from a cardiac surgery need to undergo cardiac rehabilitation. It involves going to the local rehabilitation center for checkups, counseling and physical rehabilitation exercises. It requires making time in ones’ busy schedule to allocate time in such sessions and attention to the patient who is undergoing the rehabilitation program may not be personalized and individualized. Moreover, some patients are probably faced with the stigma of re-visiting the rehabilitation center and emotional stress and trauma may prove to be more debilitating. With more common access to powerful mobile devices like pocket pc and Smartphone, this paper proposes a mobile rehabilitation coaching program catered to the personalized needs of each individual. The mobile rehabilitation coaching program also allows patients to perform their own cardiac fitness tests on their own free time and forward their results to a local rehabilitation center for assessment. The local rehabilitation then can set the appropriate parameters for the coaching program upon the detection of cardiac fitness improvement. This is to facilitate the gradual rehabilitation methods of cardiac health. The mobile phone contains the Cardiac Rehabilitation Exercise with Senses program, CREWS for short. CREWS is mainly a cardiac exercise program that is augmented to transmit the results of the cardiac exercise of a patient over to his monitoring cardiac rehabilitation centre. It is portable, fitting onto a cellular phone, hence allowing the patient to perform his daily cardiac rehabilitation exercise wherever he may be at time. Given the ECG processing algorithm on the phone, we are able to track the cardiac training exercise progress of an individual who is taking part in the cardiac tele-rehabilitation program. Moreover, this is not just a static rehabilitation program. Therapists at the Cardiac Rehabilitation center are also able to monitor and design a personalized coaching program for each individual. We have tested the system with a small test group of people using the program and we have charted the general progress of the test group.

(Abstract Control Number: 247)