Using Kinect to classify Parkinson's disease stages related to severity of gait impairment.

Background: Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease associated with motor problems such as gait impairment. Different systems based on 3D cameras, accelerometers or gyroscopes have been used in related works in order to study gait disturbances in PD. Kinect has also been used to build these kinds of systems, but contradictory results have been reported: some works conclude that Kinect does not provide an accurate method of measuring gait kinematics variables, but others, on the contrary, report good accuracy results.

A Telerehabilitation System for the Selection, Evaluation and Remote Management of Therapies.

Telerehabilitation systems that support physical therapy sessions anywhere can help save healthcare costs while also improving the quality of life of the users that need rehabilitation. The main contribution of this paper is to present, as a whole, all the features supported by the innovative Kinect-based Telerehabilitation System (KiReS). In addition to the functionalities provided by current systems, it handles two new ones that could be incorporated into them, in order to give a step forward towards a new generation of telerehabilitation systems.

TrhOnt: building an ontology to assist rehabilitation processes.

Background: One of the current research efforts in the area of biomedicine is the representation of knowledge in a structured way so that reasoning can be performed on it. More precisely, in the field of physiotherapy, information such as the physiotherapy record of a patient or treatment protocols for specific disorders must be adequately modeled, because they play a relevant role in the management of the evolutionary recovery process of a patient. In this scenario, we introduce TRHONT, an application ontology that can assist physiotherapists in the management of the patients' evolution via reasoning supported by semantic technology.

Contextual and psychological variables in a descriptive model of subjective well-being and school engagement.

: The objective of this study is to analyze both the direct relationships between perceived social support, self-concept, resilience, subjective well-being and school engagement. : To achieve this, a battery of instruments was applied to 1,250 Compulsory Secondary Education students from the Basque Country (49% boys and 51% girls), aged between 12 and 15 years (= 13.72, =1.

Psychometric properties of a shortened version of the Physical Self-Concept Questionnaire (PSQ-S).

Introduction: The four-dimensional model of physical self-concept which differentiates the physical self-perceptions of ability, condition, attractiveness and strength is widely accepted. In the last two decades much research has been done on the physical self-concept and its relations with the psychological well-being/distress, anxiety disorders or Eating Behavior Disorders (EBD).

Objective: To validate a shortened version of the Physical Self-Concept Questionnaire (PSQ-S) and verify its ability to discriminate between people with different levels of EBD.

Validation of a Kinect-based telerehabilitation system with total hip replacement patients.

The evolving telecommunications industry combined with medical information technology has been proposed as a solution to reduce health care cost and provide remote medical services. This paper aims to validate and show the feasibility and user acceptance of using a telerehabilitation system called Kinect Rehabilitation System (KiReS) in a real scenario, with patients attending repeated rehabilitation sessions after they had a Total Hip Replacement (THR). We present the main features of KiReS, how it was set up in the considered scenario and the experimental results obtained in relation to two different perspectives: patients' subjective perceptions (gathered through questionnaires) and the accuracy of the performed exercises (by analysing the data captured using KiReS).

Efficacy of a cognitive program for improving the physical self-concept of university students.

The aim of this study was to test the efficacy of a 6-wk. educational program designed to improve physical self-concept, which was carried out in the classrooms of a university physical activity and sports faculty. The experimental group comprised 45 students (M age = 18.

Real-time detection of apneas on a PDA.

Patients suspected of suffering sleep apnea and hypopnea syndrome (SAHS) have to undergo sleep studies such as expensive polysomnographies to be diagnosed. Healthcare professionals are constantly looking for ways to improve the ease of diagnosis and comfort for this kind of patients as well as reducing both the number of sleep studies they need to undergo and the waiting times. Relating to this scenario, some research proposals and commercial products are appearing, but all of them record the physiological data of patients to portable devices and, in the morning, these data are loaded into hospital computers where physicians analyze them by making use of specialized software.

Architecture, cost-model and customization of real-time monitoring systems based on mobile biological sensor data-streams.

Innovation in the fields of wireless data communications, mobile devices and biosensor technology enables the development of new types of monitoring systems that provide people with assistance anywhere and at any time. In this paper we present an architecture useful to build those kind of systems that monitor data streams generated by biological sensors attached to mobile users. We pay special attention to three aspects related to the system efficiency: selection of the optimal granularity, that is, the selection of the size of the input data stream package that has to be acquired in order to start a new processing cycle; the possible use of compression techniques to store and send the acquired input data stream and; finally, the performance of a local analysis versus a remote one.

Real-time classification of ECGs on a PDA.

The new advances in sensor technology, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wireless communications favor the development of a new type of monitoring system that can provide patients with assistance anywhere and at any time. Of particular interest are the monitoring systems designed for people that suffer from heart arrhythmias, due to the increasing number of people with cardiovascular diseases. PDAs can play a very important role in these kinds of systems because they are portable devices that can execute more and more complex tasks.

Web access to data in a mobile ECG monitoring system.

Cardiovascular diseases and, in particular, diseases related to arrhythmias are a problem that affects a significant percentage of the population, being one of the major causes of death in Europe. New advances in the fields of PDAs, mobile phones, wireless communications and vital parameter sensors have permitted the development of revolutionary medical monitoring systems, which strikingly improve the lifestyle of patients. However, not all those monitoring systems provide patients with real assistance - anywhere and at any time.