IoT Environment for Monitoring Human Movements: Hip Fracture Rehabilitation Case

Hip fracture incidence increases with age and possess a serious long-term devastating impact on the physical functionality of the older population and on their ability to live independently. Increased risk in mortality rate, movement restriction, person’s well-being and loss of independence are some of the significant problems associated with the injury. Rehabilitation plays a significant role in recovery of the muscle strength, boosting the quality of life and improving the physical functionality in all stages of care. The rehabilitation program has activity movements relevant to an injury that needs to be performed under predefined supervised or unsupervised environment. Continual monitoring of these activity movements in any environment can significantly help in follow up the correct implementation of a rehabilitation program. The ever-growing technology like Internet of Things (IoT) and advancements in digital health revolutionizing all industries and markets could be leveraged upon in advancing and converting the conventional rehabilitation care into a smart rehabilitation care. This paper proposes an IoT environment for long-term monitoring of hip fracture rehabilitation related activity movements. Functionality of the attributes involved in the environment have been discussed pragmatically through experimental analysis. Results reflect that the environment can offer flexibility for different movement monitoring, analysis and visualisation applications.