The valuable use of Microsoft Kinect™ sensor 3D kinematic in the rehabilitation process in basketball

Abstract

Subjects who practice sports either as professionals or amateurs, have a high incidence of knee injuries. There are a few publications that show studies from a kinematic point of view of lateral-structure-knee injuries, including meniscal (meniscal tears or chondral injury), without anterior cruciate ligament rupture. The use of standard motion capture systems for measuring outdoors sport is hard to implement due to many operative reasons. Recently released, the Microsoft Kinect™ is a sensor that was developed to track movements for gaming purposes and has seen an increased use in clinical applications. The fact that this device is a simple and portable tool allows the acquisition of data of sport common movements in the field. The development and testing of a set of protocols for 3D kinematic measurement using the Microsoft Kinect™ system is presented in this paper. The 3D kinematic evaluation algorithms were developed from information available and with the use of Microsoft’s Software Development Kit 1.8 (SDK). Along with this, an algorithm for calculating the lower limb joints angles was implemented. Thirty healthy adult volunteers were measured, using five different recording protocols for sport characteristic gestures which involve high knee injury risk in athletes.