JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Telerehabiliation has been shown to have a great potential in expanding access to rehabilitation services, enhancing patients' quality of life, and improving clinical outcomes. Stationary biking exercise can serve as an effective aerobic component of home-based physical rehabilitation programs. Remote monitoring of biking exercise (RMBE) provides necessary safeguards to ensure exercise adherence and safety at patient homes. Scalability of the current RMBE solutions is impeded by high cost which limits patient access to these services especially by older adults with chronic health conditions.

Objective:

The aim of this project was to design and test two low-cost wireless interfaces for telemonitoring of home-based biking exercise.

Methods:

We designed interactive biking system (iBikE) comprising a tablet PC and low-cost bike. Two wireless interfaces to monitor revolutions per minute were built and tested. The first version of the iBikE system uses Bluetooth low energy (BLE) to send information from the iBikE to PC tablet and the second version uses Wi-Fi network for communication. Both systems could give the patient and clinical team the capability to monitor exercise progress in real time using simple graphical representation. The same hardware and user interface were used for both designs. The bike can be used for upper or lower limb rehabilitation. We developed two tablet apps with the same graphical user interfaces between the app and the bike sensors but different communication protocols (BLE and Wi-Fi). Healthy adults were asked to hand-cycle for three separate sub-sessions (one minute each with slow, medium, and fast pace) with one minute resting gap. In addition to reading speed values from the iBikE app, we used a tachometer to continuously measure speed of the bikes during each sub-session. Collected data was later used to compare the functionality and accuracy of the measured data from iBikE system.

Results:

To evaluate the data, measured RPMs in each sub-session (slow, medium, and fast) from iBikE and tachometer were further divided into 4 categories, including RPMs in every 10-second bins (6 bins), RPMs in every 20-second bins (3 bins), RPMs in every 30-second bins (2 bins), and RPMs in each sub-session (60 seconds, one bin). Then for each bin, mean difference (iBikE and tachometer) was calculated, and then averaged for all bins in each sub-session. Finally, means and standard deviations (SD) of the calculated mean differences for similar categories were reported for all individuals. We saw decreasing trend in both mean and SD from 10 second to one minute measurement. For BLE iBikE system, minimum mean RPM difference was 0.2 ± 0.3 in one-minute sub-session with medium speed. This number was 0.21 ± 0.21 in one-minute sub-session with slow speed for Wi-Fi iBikE system.

Conclusions:

We concluded that a low-cost wireless interface provides necessary accuracy for telemonitoring of home-based biking exercise. Clinical Trial: N/A