An Integrated Portable Device for the Hand Functional Assessment in the Clinical Practice - Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - page 85

Fig. 6. Physician interface main window (left) and exercise monitoring (right)

Even though the signal is sent to the PC on a sample-by-sample basis, its plot is
refreshed only every 75 input samples, shifting towards left the previous blocks in the
plot linear buffer, for the sake of efficiency. All the received samples are logged thus, at
the end of the execution, the user can visualize a static plot of the whole signal including
the relevant delineation markers extracted in real-time by the device (Fig. 7). The GUI
receives the functional assessment relevant parameters (e.g. speed of execution, position
and the amplitude of the last peak, the maximum, the minimum and the mean value of
the executions), to be presented on the GUI, every 150 samples of the signal.
Beyond the whole plot of the acquired signal, the interface also enables the visualiza-
tion of the “Speed and Value plot” (Fig. 7), which overprints to a bar graph showing the
peak values, a line graph representing the frequency of the repetitions. This informa-
tion can be useful to evaluate how much the performance is dependent by the execution
speed, being important to know if smaller values achieved by the patient are caused by
a higher execution speed or by fatigue. It should be noted that traditional assessment
techniques do not consider time as discriminative factor, thus reducing the informative
content of the measurements.

5 Device Application in an Outpatient Clinic

In a rheumatologic clinical setting, 6 volunteers were enrolled with the aim to test the
portable prototypical system presented above. All the patients were enrolled from the
outpatient clinic of the Chair of Rheumatology, Department of Medical Sciences, Uni-
versity of Cagliari, Italy. They were evaluated in order to participate to the clinical
test if they fulfilled the following inclusion criteria: age 18

75 years, ability to give
informed consent, clinical remission of the inflammatory disease phase, no change in
antirheumatic treatment in the three previous months, need to perform a rehabilitation
program due to limitation in ability to perform usual self-care, vocational, and avoca-
tional activities because of an inactivity periods that preceded the clinical remission of
inflammatory phase.
All patients are female, underwent a clinical examination and were assessed accord-
ing to international guidelines. Three of them present SSc and suffered from flexion
contractures, caused by retraction of skin, subcutaneous tissues and tendon sheats.

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