Artificially Intelligent Physiotherapy

1.1. Motivation

Physiotherapists often work with other health professionals to meet individual’s health care needs. These days demands of physiotherapist are increasing but there is a lack of supply. Also, there are many benefits of physiotherapy which includes avoiding surgery, improved mobility and development, management of age related problem and improved balance. With increase in demand of physiotherapy its demand at home is also rising. But we cannot deny the fact there are some advantages of physiotherapy at home. At home better health outcomes are observed when a person is surrounded by people with whom they feel connected and at home they feel positive. Also, it is observed that at home healing is done faster.

It is observed that technology in the field of medical has been proven very beneficial. Varied amount of applications are being developed which are making life of doctors as well as patients easier. Technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the most popular one in Medical applications. Exo-skeleton is one of them which is use for arms, legs and hands videogames that motivate patients to move and motivates them to improve.

With the help of applications like these medical technology therapists are getting tools they need to give the kind of care and support which is required by the patients in need. It is also decreasing workloads from the therapists and providing them means to treat more patients than before. Therefore, advancement of technology in medical with the help of cutting edge technology inspired us to develop a system which will be changing the lives of therapists as well as patients everywhere.

1.2. Problem Statement

People might have injured joints and cannot use their limbs to their full extent, such as after a fall, a stroke, or an accident. There is a need to develop an application to distinguish normal person and affected person using artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide the need of physiotherapy to the affected people. We are proposing an idea of an automated system which will track human range of motion while tracking physiotherapy exercises of patient.

1.3. Background

In recent years with increase in treatment of injury, physical strength, functioning of body and overall movement of body with involvement of science of movement of body rather than involvement of drugs and surgery has evolved need of physiotherapy. With increase in physical activity the demand of physiotherapy has increased. As well as it has increased the requirement of rehabilitation centers and demand of physiotherapists. Technology in the field of medical is now acting as supporting system of workload on physiotherapists.

Artificial Intelligence is technically defined as the development of technology which is used to perform technology operations which require involvement of human intelligence. Recently Artificial intelligence is playing major role in advancement of technology. Machine learning is one of the key component of artificial intelligence and it provides us with the ability of both supervised and unsupervised learning for training our model. Also, there are copious amount of model provided by machine learning which can be used for better training and prediction of our system. AI technology today can be in different forms such as software programs as well as hardware interface to develop a system which is capable of learning from their own datasets. In our project AI with machine learning can be used for posture detection and then assessment of patients.

Open Pose is an open source library developed in C++ for the posture detection. It is used by importing open pose and later image is passed as NumPy matrices which is then converted to human key points. It is combination of Caffe, OpenCV, and OpenCL which is used for rendering of passed image. It is used in different fields such as hand gesture detection, Basketball games for prediction of basket throw and various other sports activities. It is also easier to use because of its capability to replace methods which involve high cost along with more equipment and time for processing.