Teaching manipulative therapy is on

Teaching manipulative therapy is one of the most relevant issues in a physiotherapy course. However, for an effective instruction of this topic practical experience is considered fundamental. To achieve this purpose, this paper presents a computer assisted environment for the practical learning of manipulative therapy. The implementation of such a laboratory includes standard Personal Computers (PCs), the popular software package Matlab, a digital camera and gloves with embedded strength sensors located in the thumb and near the wrist. The students wear a glove that measures the applied force in the patient. These signals are acquired and stored in a computer providing the teachers with the necessary information to analyze the applied force and verify if the manual therapy was successful. A digital camera is also used to record the images of the student’s movements during the manual therapy application. The developed system has an autonomy of 15 h allowing the application of thirty therapies and the corresponding data analysis.