Ali Karime

Tele-Wobble: A Telerehabilitation Wobble Board for Lower Extremity Therapy

Ankle deficiencies occur quite often among poststroke patients and people working in physically demanding professions in general. Computerized telerehabilitation systems have emerged as promising assistive tools for effective diagnosis and rehabilitation interventions. Consequently, the process of recording and analyzing the medical data captured by such systems has become vital for the generation of efficient reports that can assist clinicians to assess their patients health. In this paper, we present our telerehabilitation system called “Tele-Wobble” that consists of a modified version of a wobble board mounted with sensors and actuators, a software training game, and a web-service architecture that allows for remote monitoring of the patients training progress. The system aims to provide clinicians with key performance measurements captured during the patients training session. Our evaluations showed that Tele-Wobble may offer an efficient and cost-effective home-based rehabilitation for patients with ankle deficiencies.

A Fuzzy-Based Adaptive Rehabilitation Framework for Home-Based Wrist Training

Computer-based rehabilitation systems have emerged as promising assistive tools for effective training and diagnosis and gained popularity in clinical settings. For many patients, home-based rehabilitation can be really beneficial in their therapy journeys since it can eliminate the obstacles encountered by many of them in clinics, such as travel distance and cost. However, an effective home-training system requires a good adaptation mechanism that conforms to both the patients abilities and the therapists performance requirements. This paper introduces a Web-enabled wrist rehabilitation framework that adopts the fuzzy logic approach to provide adaptive tasks for the patient while considering the therapist training guidance. We also assess the effectiveness of the framework while coping with different training parameters by simulating a number of performance scenarios and experimenting with normal subjects. Simulation results, as well as experimental analysis, demonstrated the ability of the proposed framework to adapt to patients performance and therapists feedback.

Spectro-temporal directional derivative based automatic speech recognition for a serious game scenario

Speech is one of the important modalities in a serious game platform. Serious game can be very useful for the rehabilitation of individuals with voice disorders. Therefore, we need an efficient and high-performance automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. In this paper, we propose a spectro-temporal directional derivative (STDD) feature that requires less number of computations in the modeling and yet gives high recognition accuracy in the ASR system. The proposed STDD feature is achieved by applying different directional derivative filters in the spectro-temporal domain. The feature dimension is then compressed by discrete cosine transform. The experiments are performed with voice samples of Arabic numerals spoken by persons with and without voice pathology. The experimental results show that the STDD feature outperforms the conventional mel-frequency cepstral coefficients both in clean and noisy environments.

RFID-based interactive multimedia system for the children

In this paper, we present an interactive edutainment system for the children that leverages multimedia and RFID technologies in a seamless manner. The proposed system allows children to learn about new objects/entities by tapping on physical objects through a specially designed RFID-Bluetooth based Tangible User Interface (TUI) tool. The output of the system is delivered as a set of appropriate multimedia representations related to the objects being tapped. The TUI uses RFID technology for object identification and Bluetooth communication to transmit data to the computer where the system’s software is running. We incorporated our system in three games that allow children of different ages to benefit from the system’s functionalities and encourage them to interact with it.

E-Glove: An electronic glove with vibro-tactile feedback for wrist rehabilitation of post-stroke patients

Arm paresis is a very common disability among post-stroke survivors. It is characterized by the inability of a person to perform some specific movements in the arm. A Long term Rehabilitation process plays a key role in the recovery of this kind of disabilities, but such treatment might not be easily accessible to people living away from the cities where most of the rehabilitation centers are located. In this paper, we present our interactive rehabilitation system called “E-Glove” that is aimed to help patients with wrist impairments to perform some daily exercises in a joyful and interactive manner. A 2D golf game that could be played with the glove was developed for this purpose.

Determining wrist reference kinematics using a sensory-mounted stress ball

One of the research voids in the study of home-based rehabilitation is the lack of benchmarks of the performance for various body kinematics. The objective of this work is to form a metric to evaluate the wrist motion for rehabilitation applications. The wrist motion components that were considered in this study are the angular velocity and acceleration in each plane of movement, namely Pronation/Supination, Flexion/Extension, and Radial/Ulnar Deviations. Two games were developed to measure wrist motion variables, namely the Cup and plate game (to measure the Supination/Pronation motions), and the Golf game (a horizontal version to measure the Radial/Ulnar motions and a vertical version to measure the Extension/Flexion motions). The derived values can serve as a motion benchmark to detect proper movement and steadiness of the wrist, in order to quantify the quality of patient performance.

Magic stick: A tangible interface for the edutainment of young children

Recently, there has been a high demand for developing tools that promote education through learning. We introduce our edutainment tool called Magic Stick that helps children learn about new objects by providing their names associated by visual representations regarding these objects. Childrens parents or teachers can pick the entities they would like their children to learn about by simply attaching RFID tags to these entities. Afterwards, they can customize the type of information and visualizations related to these entities through the use of a friendly GUI designed for this purpose. In our study with young children, we found that the Magic Stick created an entertaining atmosphere among children and greatly engaged them in learning.

SmartPads: a plug-N-play configurable tangible user interface

One common concern with video games today is the lack of physical activity they demand from the user. The design of games and tangible user interfaces (TUIs) that stimulate players and engage them into fun exercising activities is starting to attract the attention of many researchers and companies. This paper presents the software and hardware design and development of a TUI intended for exercise-based games targeted mostly towards children. The proposed TUI, SmartPads, can be constructed using elemental building blocks (pads) into numerous shapes. The pads-which are individually controlled by microcontrollers-are mapped onto a computer screen in real-time. A user interacts with the TUI by stepping on the pads. To evaluate the functionality and efficiency of the TUI, we developed three games in the field of exergaming. The games also have an educational value and are integrated with multimedia output modalities to enrich children’s playing experience.

Learn-pads: A mathematical exergaming system for children's physical and mental well-being

Child obesity is one of the major challenges facing modern societies, especially in developed countries. Exergaming tools are considered as effective means to reduce obesity among kids because they require the children to exert physical strength while playing the games. However, most of the existing exergaming tools focus more on the physical well-being of its users and almost neglect the mental aspect. In this paper, we present an exergaming system that combines both aspects by promoting not only entertainment, but also learning through physical activity. The system consists of a set of footpads that allow the user to interact with video games enriched with multimedia and aimed at enhancing the math knowledge of children. Our study shows that the system have created an atmosphere of fun among the children and engaged them in learning.

RehaBall: Rehabilitation of upper limbs with a sensory-integrated stress ball

This paper presents the development of a virtual reality game and a special electronic tangible user interface that can be applied to the hand rehabilitation procedure. RehaBall consists of a VR car racing game and an oval-shaped stress ball integrated with sensors and actuators, and aim to help people with wrist injuries to perform their daily rehabilitation training from the comfort of their homes. The system can be configured to fit the rehabilitation needs of different patients by allowing them to choose the desired range of motion they would like to achieve. The training sensory data are stored in a database that could be used later on by a therapist to track the patients progress.