NMES, AI Tracking & VR Gamification – Parul University!

The greatest challenge of rehabilitation lies not with the exercise but rather with the persistence with which a patient must continue it. Since improvement requires tedious weeks or even months of guided movement, engagement is difficult to maintain, causing stagnation. As such, technology trends in physiotherapy and rehabilitation have turned to focus less on the machinery and more on ways to engage the user and measure improvement: to keep them invested and demonstrate that they are not wasting their time. There are four ways of performing this task, and a student team at Parul University, who are developing a therapeutic leg rehabilitation device, are looking into all of them, making for an interesting perspective on the field.

Neuromuscular electrical stimulation, or NMES, is the application of an external electrical stimulus to induce a muscle contraction. In a rehab context, that means stimulating a muscle the patient cannot actively contract fully due to injury or prolonged inactivity to maintain its integrity and aid in recovery. It is a clinical procedure, which means that the engineering team takes the option of using NMES on its device under consideration with due responsibility. The Parul University team, working on the leg rehab device, mentions NMES as one of the possible additions to their future product and specifically notes that it would require a proper clinical assessment before being used.

There is a certain subjectivity built into the progress assessment in any rehab program. The patient reports whether they feel stronger, but this is not always an accurate indicator of their actual condition. The combination of the two listed technologies, however, allows for a more objective approach. The load cells register the force applied by the patient, which is then tracked and turned into an actual progression report by the AI report generation software. This, in turn, serves as an objective motivation for the patient and helps the doctor/rehab therapist determine which adjustments to the treatment schedule would be beneficial.

The engagement issue is the most pressing of all, and the most promising technologies to address it are virtual reality and gamification. The former refers to making exercise a game, and the latter is implementing the mechanics of games into the rehabilitation environment. They serve to mask the repetition of the muscle engagement patterns required for healing, which patients would find extremely boring to do over and over mindlessly. Instead, the same movements can be performed in a fantasy world while riding a virtual bike or boat, depending on the scenario designed. The game aspect introduces a sense of achievement and competition, which are proven motivators, without requiring any changes to the underlying therapeutic mechanics.

A technology that only a large hospital can afford helps very few patients. This is the constraint the Parul University student team keeps returning to: rehabilitation equipment can be expensive, and a single costly component such as a motor can push a device out of reach for a small clinic. Their stated aim is to combine motorised movement, monitoring, and energy regeneration in a device that stays affordable, because a rehabilitation tool only matters if the clinics treating ordinary patients can actually buy it. The broader lesson for anyone working in health technology is that cost is a design requirement, not an afterthought. The most advanced feature is useless if the device never reaches a ward.

For students, this field sits at the intersection of engineering, biomedical science, and physiotherapy, and it is an area Parul University is active in from more than one direction. The therapeutic leg rehabilitation device, designed by a team of automobile engineering students and now a published patent application, is a working example of engineers moving into rehabilitation technology and exploring NMES, AI tracking, load cells, and VR for future versions. Rehabveda, a Parul University startup that reached Shark Tank, worked on brain-controlled rehabilitation, another route into the same field. The Pragya Advanced Skills and Simulation Centre gives healthcare students hands-on training in emergency medicine and first-line care. For a student drawn to this space, the routes run through engineering, physiotherapy, and B.Tech programs such as biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, robotics, automation, and automobile engineering!