Fernanda Irrera and her students team from the department of Engineering of Information, Electronics and Telecommunications, developed a prototype of a device for post traumatic self-rehabilitation of the arm and forearm. It's a wearable, wireless device that can be freely used. The device allows completing autonomously exercises with the arm and foreharm, helping the patient throughout the rehabilitative path.

After setting in the memory of he device an appropriate rehabilitation protocol as well as the maximum rehabilitation stages to be reached, the physiotherapist will only occasionally meet the patient. The patient, interacts with a user interface on a smartphone or PC, performs the exercises through visualization and comparison of two avatars, the first one representing the physiotherapist's protocol while the second representing the movement of his arm.

Depending on the outcome of the comparative assessment between the two avatars, the system allows the patient to proceed with the next step of the physiotherapeutic protocol or invites him to return to the previous step. From an electronic point of view, the system consists of two boards equipped with expansion boards with gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer, which calculate the rproportions to build the avatar of the arm. The two boards are positioned on the patient's arm and forearm. The communication between them takes place via Bluetooth module in a hierarchical master-slave scheme.

The algorithms developed for the detection of angles are very light and can be performed on microprocessors integrated into the board, of medium performance and low power consumption. The algorithms for the construction of the avatar and the visual comparison can be performed on an external computing station (smartphone or pc). In its engineered form, each device component of the system hardware should be as light and compact as a clock.