A rehabilitation-through-photographing support system for muscular
dystrophy patients
Authors: Sato Yuta , Kambayashi Yasushi 
Published: February 2023

We propose a system that helps patients of the Duchenne muscular
dystrophy to take photos as a part of rehabilitations. Duchenne muscular
dystrophy is a progressive disease. The disease makes it difficult for
patients to walk as their muscles contract and their muscles progressively
lose strength.Since the condition of the progresses of the disease and the
experience of daily life is different from each other for variety of
patients, it is important for caregiver to pay attention not only to
physical functions but also to psychological aspects of the patients.
Rehabilitation should be based on a holistic perspective. However,
functional training tends to focus too much on physical function recovery.
Thus, rehabilitation has paid little consideration to the psychological
aspect. To alleviate this problem and foster a sense of self-affirmation, we
designed and implemented a rehabilitation system that addresses the
psychological aspects of Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients by having them
act autonomic in rehabilitation. Research scientists of nursing have found
that the two factors of "self-initiated subject search" and "photography
based on internal evaluation criteria" are important for the quality of life
of patients as well as their rehabilitations. The two factors, "subject
search" and "acting based on internal evaluation criteria" bring positive
psychological effects to the patients through the autonomy of the
photographing. In order to elucidate the neural basis of the positive
psychological effects mediated by autonomy, we used functional magnetic
resonance imaging to investigate the effects of photography on the
psychological mal-adjustment patients brought about by the autonomic
actions. In other words, the neural basis behind the positive psychological
effect of the act of photography was demonstrated. It is conceivable that
the process of taking photographs, i.e., the actions of searching for a
subject and pressing the shutter, can improve the psychological stability of
patients with muscular dystrophy. The two actions have a combined
psychological effect due to the autonomy of the action-takers. On the
psychological side, patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy can expand
their range of activities for photography and develop curiosity and ambition
by taking photos by his own will and force, in contrast to doing monotonic
functional training. Taking photos by their own muscle help their
psychological well-being as well as rehabilitate their arm and hand muscles.
In addition, our system provides semi-automatic management of photos to
reduce the burden on caregivers. The system consists of a device that is
attached on the user’s wheelchairs to assist taking photos and an
application software to send the photos to caregivers. In order to adapt to
the muscular dystrophy patients that have weak muscle, we employed a home
video game console controller to manipulate the camera in order to press the
shutter button. We designed this device easy to use for muscular dystrophy
patients to change the directions and angles of the camera and to capture
the subject with their weak muscle forces. In order to demonstrate the
effectiveness of our system, we have conduct experiences of the system and
succeeded to obtain favorable outcome.