Smart Move

Inspiration

Physiotherapy is an important part of rehabilitation for physical injuries. A physiotherapist helps restore a patient’s mobility and prevents future injuries.

However, physiotherapy can be too expensive and time-consuming to repeatedly attend sessions at the clinic. Also, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, many Canadians were not able to regularly attend physiotherapy sessions due to limited or no service.

Enter Smart Move! A low-cost, portable, and easy to use personal device that acts as your own virtual physiotherapist.

What it does

Smart Move gives you instructions and personally guides you through physiotherapy exercises in a fun and intuitive manner from the comfort of your home. The system consists of a Raspberry Pi and an IMU Sensor which is used to track the movement and orientation of any injured body part. Smart Move also comes with a desktop app which I made to render a user’s current wrist orientation in a 3D virtual environment in real time.

The exercises are gamified to enhance the user experience. For example, I provide virtual targets that a user could try to hit and by doing that they end up moving their wrist to a proper exercise position. With your wrist, you can pretend you are controlling an airplane through different maneuvers that actually help exercise your wrist. All while being fun for all ages!

How I built it

The Raspberry Pi is the central hub which is responsible for processing all sensor data. The Pi interfaces with the IMU and runs a Kalman Filter. The Kalman Filter, which I specifically tuned, makes sure that the raw IMU data is as smooth as can be. With the filter turned on, jerky hand movements are stabilized in the 3D visualizer.

The desktop visualizer app is built to display the IMU orientation feedback in the virtual environment. Once the desktop app is initialized, the app will automatically seek the Smart Move device (Raspberry Pi) on the home wifi network and automatically connect with the IMU data stream. This communication backend is handled by ROS (Robot Operating System). Once the IMU data stream is received, the app will run through each required step of a specific wrist exercise (update text instructions and colours for the targets).