An IoT-Ready Context-Aware Patient State Framework with LLM-Driven Recommendation for Shoulder Rehabilitation
In Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based rehabilitation, patient data from wearable sensors (IMU, EMG, heart rate), clinical assessments, and surveys differ in format and granularity, complicating unified patient-state construction. Existing AI-based systems often omit fatigue level or rehabilitation stage, or they place large language models (LLMs) in the clinical decision-making role, exposing patients to hallucination risk. We propose an IoT-ready framework comprising three components: an input-source-independent context abstraction pipeline, a digital twin that simulates clinical-score trajectories, and an LLM Agent that interprets the outputs of a deterministic algorithm and a digital twin as (subject, predicate, object) Triplets to produce a retrieval-augmented clinical report. The algorithm—not the LLM—selects the 13-exercise sequence from Shoulder Pain and Disability Index (SPADI) item-level responses. Explicit per-layer schemas let IoT-sensor branches be added without changing the downstream interface. Here we evaluate the framework on the clinical-score path (three patient-reported outcome measures and six range-of-motion measures); the multi-modal IoT branches maintain deployment-target functionality. On 48 IRB-approved shoulder rehabilitation patients (144 longitudinal records; augmented to 7200 only to train the trajectory generator), real-only leave-one-subject-out evaluation gave VAS RMSE 0.658 (0–10) and SPADI RMSE 6.499 (0–100). Ablation across four surface forms revealed a fidelity–accuracy trade-off—Narrative highest on template fidelity (BERTScore F1 0.250), raw JSON highest on judge-rated accuracy—and the framework adopts the balanced-midpoint Triplet form. A claim-level audit of the Triplet-form reports left 22–31% of atomic claims unsupported (Claude Sonnet and GPT-4o judges) regardless of guideline retrieval. A raw-LLM control never reproduced the algorithm-defined sequence exactly (0 of 48), supporting deterministic, auditable sequence selection and the need for clinician review before clinical use.
Authors
- Jongsun Choi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9648-0667)
- Nackhwan Kim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9650-2755)
- Jonghyeok Mun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4919-0058)
Institutions
- Korea University (JP)
- Bank of Korea (KR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Electronics
- Published
- 2026-07-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15153307
- Primary Topic
- Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Research Foundation
- Korea University
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- Ministry of Science and ICT, South Korea
- Korea University Anam Hospital