Quality assessment of limb tracking within a therapy-based exergaming system.

Abstract

The use of exercise-based video games (exergaming) in physical therapy can improve rehabilitation outcomes. A clinically useful exergaming system requires precise motion tracking and accurate determinations of the correctness of the performed exercise. In this study, both elements were analyzed for a custom exergaming system using Kinect and a custom game, Vitalize. Using a large number of exercises, broad trends about the tracking abilities of a Kinect-based system were discovered: (1) Kinect performs significantly better in the frontal plane than in the sagittal plane; (2) error and variance are both positively correlated with range of motion in the sagittal plane; and (3) every exercise has a unique error profile for each joint involved. In this study, reference tables of errors specific to joint and exercise were created and a custom exergaming software was shown to accurately identify correct motions for use in clinical exergaming applications.