Two student teams from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University’s School of Advanced Technology won the Grand and Second prizes at the Sixth Jiangsu Province Biomedical Engineering Innovation Design Competition with their rehabilitation products. By combining games, traditional Chinese medicine and Internet of Things (IoT) technology, the teams aim to make rehabilitation training more engaging, accurate and trackable.
The Grand Prize-winning project is an intelligent carpet for lower limb rehabilitation training in children with cerebral palsy. It combines embedded hardware, IoT communication, game-based training and gait assessment technology to collect accurate data while keeping users engaged.
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Professor Jie Sun, head of the Department of Mechatronics and Robotics, said that traditional rehabilitation methods are often seen as repetitive and boring, leading many children with cerebral palsy to resist training. To address this, the team designed two games for the carpet, Whack-a-Mole and Pressure Control using real-time lighting, voice prompts and positive feedback to guide children. They also included a two-player mode to make training more social and fun.
‘Gait assessment is central to such rehabilitation training, but traditional methods rely on human observation, which can lead to big errors,’ Professor Sun noted. ‘To address this, we adopted a unique structural design and embedded advanced sensors into the carpet, creating a comprehensive intelligent system.’
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The system tracks body movements and pressure with about 95 per cent accuracy, creating a loop of training, assessment and plan updates. Data can be easily checked through a WeChat mini-program, so family members and doctors can follow progress and adjust training.
‘This project is a prime example of medical-engineering integration. It showcases the practical efforts of young students to apply technological innovation for the benefit of society and the improvement of people’s livelihoods,’ said Professor Sun.
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The system has been tested at BenQ Medical Center in Suzhou and received positive feedback from medical staff and families.
The Second Prize-winning project is a smart medical splint system – a type of brace for supporting fractures, with monitoring, data analysis and remote management abilities, designed to support treatment of common radius fractures in older people.
Traditionally, doctors use splints to keep fractures still and judge recovery mainly by experience, as progress can’t be monitored in real time. To solve this, the XJTLU student team noted problems such as no clear standards and no dynamic feedback. They proposed a new solution combining traditional Chinese splint therapy with modern IoT technology.
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The team embedded smart sensors into a splint to monitor pressure, temperature, humidity and posture at the fracture site in real time. Data are uploaded to the cloud via an IoT module and displayed on a management platform with early-warning functions. The system has been tested for stability and data reliability, and in pre-clinical trials with Suzhou Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, early results showed it could track recovery progress and predict short-term outcomes.
‘Our project transforms the experiential theory of traditional Chinese bone-setting into quantifiable real-time data,’ said Qinglei Bu, the team’s supervisor from the Department of Mechatronics and Robotics. ‘This interdisciplinary approach offers a new solution for rehabilitation in elderly patients with fractures and contributes to the digital transformation of orthopaedic rehabilitation and the modernisation of Chinese medicine.’