Abstract
Movement analysis of human body parts is momentous in several applications including clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation programs. The objective of this research is to present a low-cost 3D visual tracking system to analyze the movement of various body parts during therapeutic procedures. Specifically, a marker based motion tracking system is proposed in this paper to capture the movement information in home-based rehabilitation. Different color markers are attached to the desired joints’ locations and they are detected and tracked in the video to encode their motion information. The availability of this motion information of different body parts during the therapy can be exploited to achieve more accurate results with better clinical insight, which in turn can help improve the therapeutic decision making. The proposed framework is an automated and inexpensive motion tracking system with execution speed close to real time. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on a dataset of 10 patients using two challenging matrices that measure the average accuracy by estimating the joints’ locations and rotations. The experimental evaluation and its comparison with the existing state-of-the-art techniques reveals the efficiency of the proposed method.
Highlights
Motor disabilities are the partial or total loss of the body part’s functionality due to damage in the central nervous system, which controls the body movement
Numerous automated and semi-automated techniques have been proposed to support physiotherapy and rehabilitation programs to restore the functional ability of the patients; they can be categorized into two groups: vision-based approaches and motion sensor-based approaches (Figure 1)
We evaluate the performance of the proposed movement analysis algorithm and compare the results with the existing techniques Hesse [39] and Khan [10]
Summary
Motor disabilities are the partial or total loss of the body part’s functionality due to damage in the central nervous system, which controls the body movement. Neurological physiotherapy aims at restoring the patient’s ability to perform his/her daily life activities independently by repairing the central nervous system. To this end, the Vojta techniques [1,2] and the neurodevelopmental treatment [3,4] are the most common approaches used by the physiotherapists to deal with the motor disabilities in patients. The first family of techniques make use of markers on the human body region to represent the joints’ locations and use them to detect and track their information in the video. The second group of techniques employ the image features, such as shape, color, and edges, to detect and track the human body parts in video and encode their motion information. The techniques in the third group are marker-less; they estimate the joints’ locations using the integrated body tracking functionality of the Kinect sensor
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
