An Enhanced Treatment and Evaluation System for Myofascial Pain Syndrome

We aim to develop an innovative generic rehabilitation and evaluation equipment, which integrates high technologies in order to assist and/or replace the human labor usually required to carry out rehabilitation training. Through computer control, rehabilitation quality can be maintained at a higher level. Meanwhile, all data generated from the rehabilitation training could be stored in the database and will be used by medical staff for further treatment evaluation. This proposed system is composed mainly of three parts, including a main server, a rehabilitation training platform and a mobile monitoring device. A wireless communication technique is used to connect these three parts. Internet and mobile communication technology are integrated into the system to extend the monitoring and control distance. Through collecting the pain scale of the patient, a nested loop evaluation mechanism is used to determine the rehabilitation flow. A programmable alert mechanism is embedded to maintain a safe rehabilitation environment through a user friendly operating interface, where the patient and medical staff are allowed to set up control parameters based on their responses and needs. The results show that the proposed system can be safely used to replace human massage, thus, rehabilitation manpower can be tremendously reduced. The self-learning mechanism will provide the patient an adaptive training environment, and better treatment can be achieved as a result. In addition, a complete electronic training data collection used during the training processes will construct an e-portfolio and greatly help diagnosis or therapy in the future. Furthermore, reliable rehabilitation quality can be maintained, and therapists' industrial injuries resulting from repetitive manual therapies can therefore be prevented.