Acompanhamento e monitoramento de movimentos de indivíduos por avatar 3D em tempo real em um sistema web de telemedicina

Abstract

The study of the movements of joints of body parts is essential because they directly impact the quality of life of human beings, enabling the execution of daily activities and the practice of sports. In the literature applications are found with inertial sensors, such as the accelerometer, for monitoring and analyzing these movements, collecting representative data of individual’s activities. These works also use interesting approaches that employ avatar in three dimensions for reliable representations of body parts and their displacements, contributing to more precise and accurate analysis. However, these works present limitations such as not allowing the enlargement of the limb that is being moved, not rotating the avatar freely and not being able to choose the exact moment from which the activity will be reproduced. In this context, the Remote Monitoring and Analysis System in Telemedicine is a web application that automates an innovative method to monitor and track movements of human body parts, remotely and in real time, from data collected from inertial sensors. Currently, the application displays the individual’s activity through line charts, but can benefit users and patients by using avatar representation of movements in three dimensions. Therefore, this work aims to develop a module for monitoring movements by avatar in three dimensions in real time. The module presents functionalities such as visualizing the patient’s movement in avatar in three dimensions and in line charts remotely and in real time, in addition to allowing the interaction of the specialist with the tool, such as rotating the avatar freely at different angles. The quantitative evaluation considered delay in the real-time data transmission functionality through avatar on different combinations of receivers, servers and sampling rates. In the qualitative evaluation, 10 physiotherapists were invited to follow a script in the application and at the end answer questionnaire with 11 usability heuristics regarding their experience with the computer program. The results showed that the delay for most combinations of devices is below 400 milliseconds, meeting the recommendation for this metric. Although improvements are needed, the evaluators consider that the new module is functional and can assist in patient analysis and monitoring, meeting the proposed objective.