Monitoring Wrist and Fingers Range of Motion using Leap Motion Camera for Physical Rehabilitation

Abstract

Computer vision-based health monitoring systems have gained vast attention especially for physical rehabilitation in the past few years. This paper presents a method for measuring the flexibility of wrist and fingers using leap motion camera. Leap motion was incorporated to acquire the 3D position of hand joints. From the acquired joints, using spatial-temporal features of hand joints, physical exercises targeted at rehabilitating the fingers and wrist range of motion were recognized. Then, appropriate joints selected from the recognized exercises were applied to measure the target range of motion. Apart from the proposed method, the accuracy of leap motion sensor for wrist and fingers range of motion was verified against standard goniometry. Furthermore, the dataset created for this study is published and made publically available for further research in this field. Results of the study showed that leap motion shows promising results for measuring range of motion for several wrist and fingers rehabilitation exercises.