Abstract
Older people face difficulty engaging in conventional rehabilitation exercises for improving physical functions over a long time period due to the passive nature of the conventional exercise, inconvenience, and cost. This study aims to develop and validate a dynamic time warping (DTW) based algorithm for assessing Kinect-enabled home-based physical rehabilitation exercises, in order to support auto-coaching in a virtual gaming environment. A DTW-based algorithm was first applied to compute motion similarity between two time series from an individual user and a virtual coach. We chose eight bone vectors of the human skeleton and body orientation as the input features and proposed a simple but innovative method to further convert the DTW distance to a meaningful performance score in terms of the percentage (0–100%), without training data and experience of experts. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was validated through a follow-up experiment with 21 subjects when playing a Tai Chi exergame. Results showed that the algorithm scores had a strong positive linear relationship (r = 0.86) with experts’ ratings and the calibrated algorithm scores were comparable to the gold standard. These findings suggested that the DTW-based algorithm could be effectively used for automatic performance evaluation of an individual when performing home-based rehabilitation exercises.
Highlights
The global healthcare system is under great pressure due to rapid population aging as well as a shortage of healthcare personnel and budget [1]
Results showed that the algorithm scores had a strong positive linear relationship (r = 0.86) with experts’ ratings and the calibrated algorithm scores were comparable to the gold standard
We focused on motion correctness parts, the exact value of 90 is not always appropriate
Summary
The global healthcare system is under great pressure due to rapid population aging as well as a shortage of healthcare personnel and budget [1]. An increasing proportion of older people is facing serious challenges of impaired physical functions such as muscle strength, balance, and mobility [2]. All these negative changes result in difficulties for older people maintaining independence of daily living, which would further cause anxiety, low self-esteem, and decreased quality of life [3,4]. Even though conventional exercise therapies have been shown as effective to increase physical activities as well as improve motor functions and balance, they suffer from low rates of uptake and adherence [8,9] due to a lack of enjoyment, inconvenient transportation, and high cost [10]. Kobayashi et al [11] examined the effects of physical
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