CAREER: Aquatic Therapy Assist-Tool Using a Real-Time Underwater Physiological and Musculokinetic Monitoring in Personalized Stroke Rehabilitation

Aquatic therapy is a type of physical therapy that takes place in water and is widely used to help stroke patients recover. Water has benefits that make it easier and less painful for patients to perform rehabilitation exercises. In aquatic therapy and rehabilitation, it is essential for therapists to understand how the therapy affects each patient's performance to create a personalized program that will be most effective for them.

However, current research has not focused enough on this aspect, and instead mainly compares patients' progress before and after therapy. Therapists rely on their observations, intuitions, experience, and expertise in their practice since there is no technology available for them to accurately measure and analyze their patients' physical and muscle movements when they exercise in water.

This means that therapists are not able to adjust their instructions in real-time to ensure that their patients are doing the exercises correctly and getting the most benefit from them. Continuous monitoring and analysis of the patients' performance during aquatic therapy can provide valuable insights into how the therapy is affecting their physical abilities.

This can lead to the development of an optimized training program that is tailored to each individual's needs, resulting in more efficient and effective rehabilitation. This project aims to understand how the human body works underwater and how it responds to different movements and exercises in aquatic therapy. This knowledge will be used to develop more personalized and effective aquatic rehabilitation programs, particularly for people with neurological disorders and diseases. This research has the potential to lead to new and improved ways of treating these conditions.

This project will design an assist-tool for therapists to investigate physiological and motor improvements during aquatic therapy using a wearable system designed for the water environment and utilizing hydrophobic bio-signal sensors, and to allow them to create new evaluation metrics for individual physical assessment and personalized aquatic therapy in stroke rehabilitation based on transformative approach. This project will (1) design and evaluate an ergonomic wearable system for underwater physiological and musculokinetic monitoring, (2) investigate evaluation metrics for aquatic therapy in stroke rehabilitation, and (3) develop a systematic personalized aquatic therapy assist-tool based on the outcomes.

The project will evaluate the proposed wearable system and evaluation metrics in terms of wearability, functionality, usability, and effectiveness with clinical aquatic therapists. Along with three research aims, interdisciplinary research framework for personalized healthcare and rehabilitation will be integrated into the educational goal of broadening the participation of pre-college, undergraduate, and graduate students in healthcare engineering, fostering an interdisciplinary research group and inclusive training, and integrating the research into multidisciplinary course development. Eventually, this project will yield a paradigm shift in aquatic therapy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.