Rehabilitation

Many publications on robotic systems in healthcare describe early-stage work on low technology readiness levels. This paper describes how a mobile service robot approved as a medical device reaches higher technology readiness levels by adding peripheral functions and smaller improvements, which are pivotal for user acceptance in clinical environments and which often cannot be elicited by questioning users ex-ante as certain aspects only come in mind from testing the systems in clinical settings or operational environments. Especially developers of service robots in healthcare are advised to plan with such downstream developments, which can take significant implementation time, to obtain user acceptance and achieve widespread adoption of their robotic systems.

Skeleton-based action recognition can support automated tracking of physiotherapy exercises, particularly in remote rehabilitation settings where continuous in-person supervision is impractical. However, most existing methods are developed for large-scale daily-action benchmarks rather than rehabilitation scenarios. Public rehabilitation exercise datasets are typically small, with only subtle kinematic differences between exercise classes. For participants with motor impairments, exercise execution may also deviate from standard movement patterns in amplitude, speed, and coordination, increasing intra-class variability and making reliable recognition more difficult for skeleton-based models. We propose PhysioAI, a clinical knowledge-guided semantic supervision framework that injects structured physiotherapy knowledge into skeleton representation learning. PhysioAI combines graph-based spatiotemporal modelling of human movement with training-time semantic anchors derived from a structured Clinical Knowledge Dictionary (CKD). The CKD descriptions are encoded using a frozen Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model and projected into an anchor space, where they provide class-specific semantic targets for skeleton representation learning. The resulting CKD-derived anchors are used only during skeleton-model training; inference requires only skeleton inputs. Under subject-disjoint evaluation, PhysioAI achieves $99.03\pm1.34\%$ on KiMoRe Overall, $94.64\pm7.36\%$ on the Hard-67 stress test, and $87.44\pm7.69\%$ on UI-PRMD Overall. These results exceed the strongest comparator for each endpoint by $0.27$, $2.87$, and $1.33$ percentage points (pp), respectively. These findings demonstrate that structured clinical knowledge can serve as an effective source of training-time supervision for physiotherapy action recognition.

Finger-specific motor intent is a clinically meaningful control signal for post-stroke neurorehabilitation, where residual muscle activity may remain measurable despite weak or incomplete movement. We study five-finger multilabel intent decoding from impaired-arm high-density surface electromyography (sEMG) in PhysioMio, a bilateral longitudinal dataset collected from stroke patients. A common processing protocol aligns movement labels, applies 20--450 Hz Butterworth filtering and Symlet-4 wavelet denoising, segments overlapping 200 ms windows, and extracts twelve time- and frequency-domain descriptors per channel. Direct LSTM, CNN, and GNN baselines reveal complementary behavior: the LSTM attains the highest subset accuracy (0.545), whereas the GNN attains the highest macro F1 (0.706) and macro AUPRC (0.776). Architecture search then identifies CNN-Large as the strongest single-split CNN, with 0.593 subset accuracy and 0.714 macro F1, while CNN-Micro provides a compact architecture for embedded inference. To match a four-sensor hardware design, we retrain CNN-Micro using channels associated with ECRB, ECRL, FDS, and FDP and exclude the ground electrode from model input. Across five seeds, cross-channel knowledge distillation improves the four-channel student over direct training, reaching $0.5219 \pm 0.0114$ subset accuracy, $0.7612 \pm 0.0038$ finger accuracy, and $0.6095 \pm 0.0058$ macro F1. The selected 123K-parameter model accepts nine windows of 48 features and has been exported to ONNX. These results establish a reproducible software path from post-stroke sEMG to compact five-finger intent prediction for subsequent hardware-in-the-loop evaluation.

Motor imagery (MI) electroencephalography (EEG) decoding could support post-stroke rehabilitation, but models developed on healthy cohorts may not transfer reliably to pathological EEG. We evaluated whether Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) can efficiently adapt three pretrained EEG foundation models (i.e., LaBraM-base, REVE-base, and REVE-large) for binary left- versus right-hand MI decoding. Frozen-backbone head-only baselines and LoRA adaptation were evaluated using subject-wise five-fold cross-validation on the PhysioNet EEG Motor Movement/Imagery Dataset and a binary subset of the UET175 dataset comprising 30 stroke participants. On EEGMMIDB, LoRA increased accuracy to 0.822 for LaBraM-base and 0.957 for REVE-base. On UET175, all head-only models performed near chance. With LoRA, LaBraM-base remained near chance (0.499$\pm$0.009), whereas REVE-base reached 0.847$\pm$0.194 and outperformed REVE-large (0.806$\pm$0.178), indicating that increased model capacity alone did not improve stroke-domain adaptation. The strongest stroke configuration, REVE-base LoRA, was further evaluated using within-cohort leave-one-subject-out cross-validation (LOOCV), showing 0.952 mean accuracy, but subject-wise accuracy ranged from 0.586 to 1.000, revealing a small low-performing tail. Zero-shot transfer from EEGMMIDB to UET175 remained near chance (0.464$\pm$0.072). These findings show that healthy-benchmark performance does not ensure transfer to stroke EEG. Translation of EEG foundation models to pseudo-online or real-time rehabilitation BCIs should therefore include target-domain adaptation and subject-level assessment of temporal informativeness, spatial sensitivity, and physiological discriminability.

Autonomous rehabilitation systems must not only recognize human motion but also provide structured feedback to support users without continuous therapist supervision. This paper presents a telerehabilitation pipeline that integrates skeleton-based exercise quality assessment and short-term motion prediction into a two-module system operating on marker-free RGB video. A self-attentive Bidirectional LSTM performs exercise quality classification using MMD-NCA metric learning, while a graph-based motion prediction module computes per-joint position errors between predicted and observed poses, generating spatially localized deviation signals. Each module is evaluated independently on established benchmarks: the classifier achieves 96.45% mean-class accuracy on squat sequences from the PROZIS dataset, and the adopted STARS predictor achieves a mean MPJPE of 75.8 mm at 560 ms on Human3.6M, outperforming graph and recurrent baselines across all prediction horizons. The framework is designed for eventual deployment in assistive robotics and home-based rehabilitation contexts; end-to-end integration and clinical validation are important directions for future work. By combining motion recognition and prediction in a single system, this work contributes a step toward autonomous, feedback-driven telerehabilitation, for more accessible and scalable rehabilitation solutions.

Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair. Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure. This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incompatible signals for invalid actions, missing procedures, and strict-format errors. Our insight is that development-set failures can recover part of the missing diagnostic substrate by deciding which recovery interventions are admissible before test-time correction. We propose DARC, a diagnosis-guided recovery harness that profiles task-family failure modes, prunes mismatched interventions from a shared recovery library, and freezes a verifier-selected success-cost policy for deployment. This causal order makes correction selective: the harness first determines what kind of failure can be repaired, then decides how much recovery evidence to spend. In ALFWorld, AppWorld, and XBRL Finance, the same protocol yields an action-validity harness, a procedural-recovery fallback, and a format-precision retrieval policy; in each evaluated setting it improves average task performance over base agents and broad playbooks while reducing environment steps or retrieval budget. Our experiments show that failures need not trigger uniformly more context: DARC turns self-correction from prompt expansion into recovery-interface design. DARC provides a practical route toward more reliable agents in domains where compiler-like feedback is absent: making failures actionable before making contexts larger.

Eliciting explainable AI (XAI) requirements from stroke survivors presents a methodological challenge with direct implications for the design of trustworthy brain-computer interfaces for rehabilitation. How can patients and caregivers articulate preferences about algorithmic transparency when they lack conceptual frameworks for explainability, and when standard elicitation approaches are structurally inadequate for users with acquired communication disorders? We present a video-based scaffolding protocol for XAI requirements elicitation, developed and piloted in a rehabilitation context. In a formative study with three stroke survivors (two with moderate-to-severe aphasia) and three caregivers, facilitators employed four scaffolding approaches alongside the videos: 1) analogical bridging mapping AI states to familiar systems, 2) projective personas depersonalising sensitive topics, 3) binary forcing reducing cognitive load, and 4) extended response time. These approaches successfully surfaced heterogeneous, sometimes conflicting XAI needs across participants. Reflexive analysis additionally revealed three systematic facilitation biases, namely, normative bias, hypothesis confirmation bias, and presence effect, where scaffolding inadvertently shaped responses. We present these as protocol risk guidelines for practitioners. Together, the protocol and guidelines constitute a reusable methodological contribution for eliciting patient-facing XAI requirements in rehabilitation, arguing that such elicitation is a necessary prerequisite for trustworthy human-machine systems design, not an optional preliminary.

The Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) is a widely-used upper limb outcome measure in neurorehabilitation, but its ordinal scoring is subjective and suffers from limited sensitivity and specificity. We evaluated whether artificial-intelligence (AI)-based markerless motion capture (MMC), embedded into ARAT assessments during clinical routine, accurately reconstructs upper limb movement and yields valid, objective kinematic metrics carrying clinically meaningful information beyond the ordinal score. Across 47 sessions from 20 mixed-neurological patients (1,174 ARAT tasks), biomechanical reconstruction was accurate and robust across impairment levels, and kinematic metrics showed the discrimination pattern expected of a construct-valid measure. In longitudinal case studies, the metrics added the specificity and sensitivity the ordinal score lacks: a domain decomposition exposed patient-specific recovery profiles underlying equal ARAT gains (specificity), and kinematic improvement continued to be detected after the ARAT had saturated (sensitivity). MMC in clinical routine can thus provide valid, objective, sensitive, and specific kinematic measurement complementing ordinal scoring.

Rehabilitation scoring systems are most useful when their outputs can be reviewed and interpreted within clinical workflows. This study presents PhaseAware, a compact framework for continuous rehabilitation quality assessment that combines a temporal backbone with phase- and body-group descriptors through a backbone-conditioned gated residual pathway. The model was evaluated on the UI-PRMD deep-squat protocol and further tested on the KIMORE squatting subset. On UI-PRMD, PhaseAware achieved an RMSE of 0.0230, corresponding to an 88.9% reduction relative to the accepted baseline. It also maintained favorable performance on KIMORE, suggesting that the phase-aware design transfers across related squatting protocols. In addition to score prediction, PhaseAware generates structured review cues based on phase- and body-level sensitivity, highlighting the movement stages and body regions most relevant to each prediction. The architecture employs a backbone-conditioned gated residual mechanism to stabilize feature representation, supporting use in resource-constrained settings. These cues are intended to support clinician review, boundary-case monitoring, and human-in-the-loop triage rather than autonomous decision-making. Overall, PhaseAware offers a practical and interpretable approach to rehabilitation scoring that may help integrate automated assessment into information systems while preserving clinician oversight.

Cognitive remediation tasks often require patients to perform structured actions involving object manipulation and sequential reasoning. For patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, these tasks are crucial for addressing severe cognitive deficits. However, evaluating the correctness of these physical actions generally relies on manual observation by clinicians, which introduces subjectivity and limits the scalability of therapeutic interventions. In this paper, we propose an automated framework based on Vision-Language Models for action verification in cognitive remediation tasks tailored for schizophrenia rehabilitation. The proposed system relies on a camera-monitored tabletop environment composed of structured miniature scenes including roads, a roundabout, a park, and toy vehicles. Patients receive audio instructions describing goal-oriented spatial actions to perform by manipulating a toy vehicle. These interactive physical activities are specifically designed to stimulate targeted cognitive functions, such as sustained attention, motor coordination, spatial navigation, and cognitive flexibility. To verify the correctness of the performed actions without requiring continuous clinical oversight, the system analyzes the video feed tracking the patient's hand and toy movements. A fine-tuned Vision-Language Model interprets the recorded video sequences and generates semantic descriptions of the observed activities, enabling high-level verification of the executed actions with respect to the initial textual instructions. A dedicated dataset of 4634 tabletop cognitive remediation video scenarios was collected to evaluate the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate that our specialized framework effectively bridges low-level physical telemetry with high-level clinical feedback, presenting a scalable and objective solution for advanced cognitive rehabilitation.

Musculoskeletal diseases are among the leading causes of disability worldwide and create the greatest global need for rehabilitation. Because recovery, remodelling and degeneration often unfold over months to years, musculoskeletal care requires longitudinal management that repeatedly integrates evolving patient evidence, external medical knowledge and stage-specific functional goals. In routine practice, this evidence is fragmented across visits, departments and hospital systems, limiting individualized, evidence-based care. Here we report OrthoPilot, a clinical artificial intelligence system powered by a large language model that integrates hospital data streams with authoritative external knowledge for continuous musculoskeletal management. OrthoPilot autonomously retrieves real-time imaging, laboratory, pathology and order data and converts evolving patient states into evidence-based decisions from admission diagnosis to rehabilitation planning. We established a specialist-validated benchmark from real-world electronic health records spanning 1,000 disease codes. In a reader study across the complete care pathway, OrthoPilot was compared with 81 orthopaedic physicians and surpassed experts with 25 years of experience in diagnostic reasoning, clinical decision-making and management planning. It also outperformed all evaluated intelligent systems across 60 external clinical centres. In a prospective study of 1,870 complex cases, OrthoPilot increased full-chain management success by 10.6%. During an 8-month randomised deployment involving 8,240 inpatients, it increased cumulative cases per bed by 9.7% and improved patient-reported access to health information. These results move clinical AI from predicting isolated events toward executing longitudinal management across complete musculoskeletal care pathways.

Soft robotic exogloves can provide hand rehabilitation and assistance. Fitting these gloves often relies on standardized measurements not tailored to the individual, limiting their effectiveness, especially for fine articulation necessary for dexterous manipulation. We present the design, fabrication, modeling, and testing of a personalized pneumatically-actuated soft robotic exoglove. The glove was fit to a user's hand with topological scans and fabricated with silicone mold casting. Finite element analysis (FEA) was performed to evaluate actuator bending and forces from physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) between an actuator and a simplified personalized biomechanical finger model. Pneumatic pressure control experiments were conducted to flex the user's finger with static and dynamic references. Fabrication results show that topological scans enable precise tailoring to hand anatomy. Simulations showed that anatomical personalization enables analysis of pHRI contact forces, and results indicate sufficient joint mobilization with non-ideal compression on the proximal phalanx. Pneumatic testing indicates that pressure control allows accurate and targeted mobility of the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) and proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joints with intrinsic stiffness. Testing of multiple designs showed that relaxing the strain-limiting layer improves actuator-to-finger joint alignment during actuation. This work presents personalization to the human hand in structural conformability, joint topology, modeling of pHRI contact, and time-dependent actuation-deformation profiles. This lays a groundwork for informing exoglove design optimization to enable assistance in dexterous manipulation and neuromuscular rehabilitation of fine motor skills.

Markerless motion capture (MMC) techniques have been widely beneficial in biomechanical analysis of human movement; however, application to complex motions of the hand lags other musculoskeletal systems. The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the performance of a biomechanical reconstruction method that implements a gradient-based optimization approach with a biomechanical model in the loop for tracking dexterous, unconstrained hand movements using MMC. Using a custom, 8-camera setup, we acquired 121 video recordings from 6 participants performing 11 different tasks that spanned 6 hand postures, 5 object manipulation tasks, and involved motion of the proximal upper limb joints. Performance of the proposed MMC pipeline was directly compared to a more commonly adopted two-stage reconstruction method that first triangulates 2D keypoints from computer vision pose estimation algorithms to 3D and then enforces biomechanical constraints by solving a constrained inverse kinematics problem. Relative performance was assessed qualitatively by visual inspection and quantitatively using a computer vision metric. Our method generated solutions for all 121 video recordings; the two-stage method did not converge for 15% of the recordings. Across the remaining videos, our method produced more biomechanically plausible hand kinematics than the two-stage method and was more robust to occlusion effects during tasks that involved objects. The relative robustness of the end-to-end method suggests that it is more effective in utilizing the available 2D digital keypoint information. Automatic and biomechanically meaningful tracking of hand kinematics during dexterous movements has the potential to support clinical evaluation, rehabilitation monitoring, and studies of human motor control.

Counterfactual explanations (CEs) for multivariate time-series classifiers are often difficult to interpret in domains where experts reason in terms of semantic feature groups rather than individual channels. In rehabilitation movement analysis with multi-sensor inertial measurement units (IMUs), clinicians interpret motion through muscle-group and joint-segment abstractions; yet, most existing counterfactual methods operate at the channel level, producing scattered and biomechanically incoherent explanations. We propose a two-stage framework for group-based counterfactual generation in high-dimensional IMU data. We first show that Shapley-Adaptive (SA) group ranking preserves counterfactual validity but fails to enforce group-level sparsity, motivating the need for explicit group selection. We then introduce Learnable Gate (LG) methods, which incorporate trainable per-group relevance gates jointly optimized with perturbation masks. Experiments on the KneE-PAD rehabilitation dataset demonstrate that LG substantially improves modality-group sparsity compared to the channel-level M-CELS baseline while maintaining or improving validity, temporal smoothness, and generation efficiency. Exercise-specific analyses further show that group-structured counterfactuals yield concise, muscle-level corrective guidance aligned with clinical reasoning. Overall, the proposed framework enhances interpretability without sacrificing counterfactual quality, enabling more actionable explanations for rehabilitation movement analysis.

Rehabilitation exercises are essential in restoring lost physical functions of patients suffering from various diseases (e.g., Parkinson's, back pain). Carrying out these rehabilitation exercises, often prescribed by health experts, is costly, unavailable, and requires expert supervision. The availability of RGBD images and movement/position data of joints along with expert annotation of exercise data has prompted the use of automatic assessment of the quality of rehabilitation exercises, which is cost-effective and can be carried out at home. However, existing approaches do not extract relevant features, lack practical application, require expensive pre-processing, or overlook crucial features. This study proposes a transformer-based framework for point clouds to extract features and assess rehabilitation exercises by analyzing joint positions collected through RGBD data. We adapt and utilize a curve-based point-cloud feature aggregation technique to augment point-cloud information that aids model output. The transformer architecture also uses axial self-attention, recognizing important joints and their roles to assist users in performing the exercise better. The guided system outperforms existing approaches and is also practically relevant due to its small size, fast inference, and generalization on specific joints in similar exercises. We conduct our experiments on three crucial baseline datasets for rehabilitation exercises: Kimore, UI-PRMD, and IRDS.

Understanding how users perceive and respond to robot failures is essential for building robust and trustworthy robot systems. Prior work, however, (i) often treats failures as independent events, (ii) emphasizes binary failure detection, (iii) with rule-based recovery modeling. We present REPAIR-Bench, built on 214 interaction trials from 41 participants, the benchmark spans four induced failure types and provides synchronized facial action units, head pose, speech transcripts, and post-interaction affect and recovery reports. The benchmark spans three novel evaluation tasks that jointly capture the lifecycle of failure in human-robot interaction (HRI): (i) failure detection over inter-dependent interaction sessions, modeling longitudinal user adaptation across repeated failures; (ii) visual failure-type classification beyond binary success/failure formulations; and (iii) user-centered recovery prediction, inferring users' preferred recovery strategies from interaction context rather than relying on manually designed or rule-based strategies. In baseline experiments, hierarchical recurrent modeling improved failure detection over a single-session model (strict F1: 0.80 vs. 0.68), achieved a failure localization mean signed error of -0.51 s, median absolute error of 2.97 s and, for recovery prediction, a QLoRA-tuned Mistral-7B reached Hit@5=0.76 and F1@5=0.32. REPAIR-Bench provides both the HRI and Medical HRI communities with a standardized framework for (1) evaluating robot failures and (2) building transparent, adaptive, and trustworthy recovery systems.

Tailoring stroke rehabilitation requires assessing how movements are organized, not merely if they succeed. Currently, this assessment is a rate-limiting bottleneck. Instruments like the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) compress rich behavioral observations into single ordinal endpoints, discarding the movement-quality details that distinguish recovery from compensation. Automated alternatives typically chase accuracy on noisy, single-observer labels to output opaque scores - a technology-centric approach that rarely reaches clinical practice. To address this, we present xAARA: an engine designed to augment rather than replace clinical judgment. From multi-view video, xAARA returns ARAT assessments with calibrated uncertainty and explanations across task, movement-phase, and movement-quality levels. Treating clinical scoring as an ill-posed inference problem, xAARA composes 692 calibrated multimodal models via a Dynamic Bayesian Network with entropy-based gating. It qualifies results against clinical validity rules and defers low-confidence cases. In 105 stroke survivors (788 exercises), xAARA achieved 94.2% task accuracy (Cohen's kappa=0.934) and 81.3% movement-phase accuracy (kappa=0.727), reducing predictive uncertainty by 96.1% compared to single-clinician scoring. For subjective cases, it matched at least one rater 100% of the time and never returned out-of-range scores. Four independent clinicians validated the assessments and indicated willingness to adopt the system. We argue that principled uncertainty quantification and clinician-aligned explainability are the critical bridges moving automated assessment from technical demonstration to a deployable clinical tool.

Remote patient monitoring depends on patient-reported data to capture the subjective dimension of recovery that devices cannot measure. The Quality of Recovery (QoR-15) survey is the gold-standard instrument for this purpose. It was designed and validated for occasional in-hospital assessment, yet remote monitoring now administers it to patients daily. In our own post-surgical deployment, only 55% of patients submitted the survey more than 14 days of 30 monitoring days. We developed QoR-compact, a five-item daily input for the RPM prediction pathway. Setting a deployment-driven target of one-third of the daily items, we exhaustively evaluated all 3,003 five-question subsets of the QoR-15 and tested whether the best of them matches the full instrument in predicting near-term postoperative recovery severity. QoR-compact achieves a mean AUC-ROC of 0.968 (95% CI 0.915-0.988), statistically comparable to the 0.964 baseline obtained with one-third of the items. Patient-level backtesting indicates that it tracks readmission events as faithfully as the full form. Its five items span the physical and psychological axes of recovery: Q3 (feeling rested), Q9 (feeling comfortable and in control), Q10 (general well-being), Q12 (severe pain), and Q14 (feeling worried or anxious). The QoR-15 remains the gold-standard measure of recovery; QoR-compact complements it as a shorter daily input designed for prediction. This parity provides the basis for a prospective study of whether a lighter daily input is, in turn, completed more consistently. External validation on larger cohorts is required before clinical use.

Robotic haptic devices combined with virtual reality offer novel opportunities to train fine force generation, an essential yet overlooked component of post-stroke rehabilitation. This study proposes that manipulating the rendered dynamics of tangible virtual objects can be leveraged to train precise force control while engaging the somatosensory system. We conducted an experiment with fifty healthy participants who performed a curling-inspired task in which they had to stretch a virtual spring to generate a target release force to propel the stone to a predefined location on the ice sheet. During training, the spring's force-elongation relationship was modeled as either a linear or non-linear function, i.e., a Gaussian or antisymmetric Gaussian (AS-Gaussian) function with zero derivative at the release target force. Results indicate that the AS-Gaussian group consistently achieved higher force accuracy during training than the linear group, while the Gaussian group only outperformed the linear group toward the end of training. Analysis of personality traits revealed that higher Free Spirit scores were associated with poorer performance and reduced task exploration under Gaussian dynamics, whereas higher Transform-of-Challenge scores correlated with increased exploration. Despite these training effects, no significant differences in long-term retention were found across spring types or personality traits. Participants primarily relied on learned target elongation rather than target force, as evidenced by performance in a transfer task with a different stiffness but the same target force. While promising for somatosensory neurorehabilitation, these methods require refinement to reduce reliance on proprioceptive cues before testing with neurological patients.

Motion capture is the gold standard for measuring human movement, but clinical use remains limited by cost, technical complexity, and privacy concerns. AIGaitor is a privacy-preserving, cloud-free motion analysis system that runs markerless monocular motion-capture pipelines and downstream deep-learning analysis entirely on a consumer smartphone using on-device neural accelerators. To motivate its design, we surveyed 74 rehabilitation clinicians: 92 percent said they would adopt an accurate, cost-effective, easy-to-use AI gait analysis tool, while 79.7 percent cited operating cost, 68.9 percent insufficient training, and 64.9 percent privacy concerns as leading barriers. We then optimized and benchmarked mobile iOS implementations of current monocular pipeline components, including 2D and 3D pose estimation, pose optimization, skeleton-based deep-learning analysis, and a vision-language model. A Time-Priority end-to-end on-device pipeline processes a 10 s 4K 60 fps video clip in 77 s on an iPhone 14, matching or beating the same pipeline on a high-end NVIDIA H200 cloud server when network transfer is included: 94 s at global mobile-average uplink and 66 s at developed-world Wi-Fi. Lightweight models such as ViTPose-s achieve real-time keypoint extraction, and skeleton-based action-recognition models provide sub-millisecond gait classification on the same clip. To our knowledge, AIGaitor is the first monocular system to demonstrate end-to-end on-device motion capture and downstream deep-learning analysis, supporting clinically applicable movement analysis that is low-cost, private, and accessible to smartphone users.

Rehabilitation aims to help patients with limited mobility regain their physical abilities through targeted movements, exercises, stimulation, and other therapeutic methods. Recent advances in technology have introduced sensor-based systems into rehabilitation and clinical practices, enabling real-time monitoring and providing accurate feedback on movement accuracy. Among these sensors, LiDAR has demonstrated strong potential, offering key advantages over conventional techniques such as camera-based systems, which raise privacy concerns, and wearable sensors, which can be uncomfortable and prone to errors. In this work, we review the applications of LiDAR in rehabilitation, post-injury care, and hospital environments, focusing on studies published between 2019 and 2025. Studies across several areas have been explored: 3D body scanning and gait analysis with standalone LiDAR, LiDAR mounted on robotic systems for rehabilitation, real-time monitoring and environment scanning for safe navigation, and activity and position recognition. We also analyze processing techniques, particularly learning-based approaches, and support the discussion with statistical analysis, highlighting trends, gaps, and future research opportunities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey dedicated to LiDAR for rehabilitation applications, providing an overview of current methods, AI-based processing techniques, and open challenges.