Multimedia-based Rehabilitation Service

ETRI has developed a 4D remote rehabilitation system that allows users to have rehabilitation treatment at home
or nursing homes without visiting to hospitals or rehabilitation centers.
By taking advantage of 4D technology, this rehabilitation treatment system maximizes the sense of realism through smells, wind,
and vibration and as a result significantly mitigates the feeling of dullness, the largest obstacle to rehabilitation treatment process.
The system also enables patients to have remote rehabilitation treatment even at home by transmitting
the accuracy of patients’ movements and their physical capabilities to medical staff and trainers.
ETRI has completed international standardization registration of the 4D content technology used in this system
and is planning to commercialize the technology after developing a range of content.

Fun Rehabilitation Exercise using Mobile Devices

The major details of the newly developed vestibular rehabilitation system include
multimedia transmission technology equipped with sensory effects, media gateway technology, sensory
effect representation technology, and service recommendation technology based on context cognition.
One of the most notable characters of this system is that it provides a realistic rehabilitation exercise service
which is available anytime and anywhere using mobile devices.
The exercise system installed within the actual ETRI lab shows
how a patient performs the movement demonstrated by a rehabilitation trainer in the exercise video.
The camera sensor captures the movement of the patient,
and the Center of Mass(CoM) sensor of the foothold detects
the weight of the patient based on the changing Center of Mass.
Based on the combination of the values detected by the camera and pressure sensors,
this system analyzes how well the patient follows the rehabilitation treatment and shows daily and monthly trends in graphs.

New Business for Rehabilitation Treatment

The realistic vestibular rehabilitation system developed by ETRI is part of a project sponsored
by the Korean government(MSIP) to establish R&D infrastructure for realistic media industry and to diffuse its achievements.
The technology was developed through joint research with participation
by the Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation of Dongguk University, Man&Tel, and Unus.
Since patients can take part in rehabilitation exercise to maintain bodily balance anytime
without visiting hospitals or rehabilitation centers, the system is projected to expand into services
suitable for a society like Korea that is undergoing rapid aging of population.
“We need to stabilize and advance the system, diversify content,
and additionally develop convenient elements such as mobile applications
in order to apply the new technology to complete rehabilitation training,”
said Dr. Jae Du Heo, head of the Convergent Technology Future Research Team of ETRI.
“We will transfer our technology to businesses in the rehabilitation medical sector and seek swift commercialization.”
On January, ETRI and Man&Tel jointly demonstrated the technology developed for the multimedia realistic vestibular rehabilitation system
at the CES 2015, the world’s largest electronics and technology trade show, held in Las Vegas, the United States.