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Conducting individualised hand therapy evaluation with around-device hand movements

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Abstract

Office workers often resort to therapeutic systems to address muscular and nerve disorders caused by poor gestures and extraordinary workloads. These systems deliver effective treatment with a playable experience. However, the therapeutic evaluation still heavily relies on occupational therapists’ diagnose, which is time-consuming and subjective. This highlights the necessity for a system that adheres to standard treatment protocols and enables individualised therapeutic evaluations. In this study, we proposed a hand therapy system based on around-device hand movements with a capacitive-sensing mobile phone case to realise instant yet approximate hand therapy evaluation. Moreover, we conducted empirical studies to investigate the usability and acceptability of this system and its potential influence on office workers’ willingness to take hand therapy exercises during working hours. The results showed that this instant yet approximate evaluation system can significantly improve the workers’ hand therapy frequencies during working intervals. Furthermore, it can quantitatively measure and report on individual therapy performances, helping office workers understand their therapy outcomes and promoting their willingness to take therapeutic hand exercises. Our results introduce a new perspective for designing mobile systems for well-being.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available because the current datasets contain privacy information such as participant facial images that are not fully anonymised but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This research work is co-supported by the project of Zhejiang provincial key R&D program (ref no 2022C03103), national natural science foundation of China (ref no 61972346), and the major research plan of the national natural science foundation of China (ref no 92148205).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Xiangdong Li, Kailin Yin, Siyang Shen & Hanfei Xia

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  1. Xiangdong Li
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  2. Kailin Yin
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  3. Siyang Shen
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  4. Hanfei Xia
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Correspondence to Kailin Yin.

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Li, X., Yin, K., Shen, S. et al. Conducting individualised hand therapy evaluation with around-device hand movements. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 12687–12704 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-16099-x

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