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Comparative Study
. 2020 Apr 23;19(1):25.
doi: 10.1186/s12938-020-00762-7.

Kinect and wearable inertial sensors for motor rehabilitation programs at home: state of the art and an experimental comparison

Bojan Milosevic  1 , Alberto Leardini  2 , Elisabetta Farella  3
Affiliations
Comparative Study

Kinect and wearable inertial sensors for motor rehabilitation programs at home: state of the art and an experimental comparison

Bojan Milosevic et al. Biomed Eng Online. .

Abstract

Background: Emerging sensing and communication technologies are contributing to the development of many motor rehabilitation programs outside the standard healthcare facilities. Nowadays, motor rehabilitation exercises can be easily performed and monitored even at home by a variety of motion-tracking systems. These are cheap, reliable, easy-to-use, and allow also remote configuration and control of the rehabilitation programs. The two most promising technologies for home-based motor rehabilitation programs are inertial wearable sensors and video-based motion capture systems.

Methods: In this paper, after a thorough review of the relevant literature, an original experimental analysis is reported for two corresponding commercially available solutions, a wearable inertial measurement unit and the Kinect, respectively. For the former, a number of different algorithms for rigid body pose estimation from sensor data were also tested. Both systems were compared with the measurements obtained with state-of-the-art marker-based stereophotogrammetric motion analysis, taken as a gold-standard, and also evaluated outside the lab in a home environment.

Results: The results in the laboratory setting showed similarly good performance for the elementary large motion exercises, with both systems having errors in the 3-8 degree range. Usability and other possible limitations were also assessed during utilization at home, which revealed additional advantages and drawbacks for the two systems.

Conclusions: The two evaluated systems use different technology and algorithms, but have similar performance in terms of human motion tracking. Therefore, both can be adopted for monitoring home-based rehabilitation programs, taking adequate precautions however for operation, user instructions and interpretation of the results.

Keywords: Home rehabilitation; Kinect; Motor rehabilitation; wearable inertial sensors.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Sample data for a lunge exercise as performed in the lab without clothes (left), and with clothes (right), as monitored by wearable IMUs (IMU KF), Kinect v2 and gait analysis. The plots show in series over time 5 repetitions of normal execution, followed by 5 repetitions with larger forward inclination of the trunk
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Sample data for a lunge exercise as performed at home and monitored by wearable IMUs (IMU KF) and the Kinect v2. The plots show in series over time 5 repetitions of normal execution, followed by 5 repetitions with larger forward inclination of the trunk
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Data collection sessions in the gait analysis laboratory: the same overall setup with the instrumentation mounted on a subject for a standard gait analysis (left, undressed) and for more realistic final user condition (right, dressed). Instrumentation includes IMUs on relevant body segments and reflective markers on relevant anatomical landmarks according to the gait analysis protocol [113]
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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