2020 Volume 20 Issue JPN Pages 24-30
Rehabilitation is a co-creative medical service that strongly requires patient involvement. Encouraging patients to continue rehabilitation is an important role of medical services, and evaluation technology is also important from that perspective. The evaluation technology for rehabilitation was developed from the physical structure evaluation using medical images to the physical function evaluation using motion capture, ground reaction force and digital human models. Also, the idea that what should be restored is not only physical function but also daily-living function has been advocated, and standard description and evaluation of daily-living functioning have been promoted since the latter half of the 1990s. Furthermore, since 2000, research to evaluate functional recovery of the cranial nervous system, which controls motor function recovery, has made rapid progress in the field of neuro-rehabilitation. The rehabilitation evaluation has been integrated by the evaluation of the physical function, daily-living functioning, and the functional recovery of the cranial nervous system. In the future, these three functional evaluation technologies will be implemented in cooperation with advanced medical equipment that can be used in hospitals and wearable equipment and nursing robots that can be used in daily life. We believe that each person will be able to continue their daily rehabilitation with motivation while confirming to what extent the effects of rehabilitation are exerted on their cranial nerves, motor functions, and daily-living functions.
