| dc.description.abstract | In Taiwan, when a patient is admitted at a rehabilitation clinic, he or she will be assessed by rehabilitation specialists to devise an appropriate treatment program. Most of the rehabilitation professionals usually adopt the visual assessment incorporated with some gait and posture charts to assess whether one has good gaits or postures while one is walking or standing still. In fact, the ability to perform a gait and posture evaluation accurately and thoroughly requires many skills on the part of rehabilitation professionals. While the advantages of the visual assessment are its simplicity and no need of expensive equipment, its disadvantages are imprecise, subjective, inefficient, etc. Therefore, rehabilitation specialists encounter the problem of being unable to objectively assess the treatment effect after each individual course of treatment. Owing to this problem, it is difficult for rehabilitation specialists to modify their treatment programs to help patients quickly recover from treatment programs and back to normal daily life.
Therefore, a computerized gait and posture assessment system is needed. A good computerized gait and posture assessment system should be able to provide precise measurements about gaits and postures and output documents of the treatment and progress history. Of course, if the cost of the assessment system is low enough, then more rehabilitation clinics will be willing to adopt the system for their treatments. This motivated us to develop a Kinect-based gait and posture assessment system. The assessment system consists of three sub-systems: (1) the gait assessment sub-system, (2) the posture assessment sub-system and (3) the range of joint motion assessment sub-system. We fully utilize the advantages of the Microsoft Kinect which is a viable and low-cost sensing platform capable to provide full-body and limb tracking. Since the Kinect is still subject to inaccurate tracking and skeleton placement, some special algorithms have to be developed to provide precise measurements about gaits, postures, and range of motion for several critical joints. Several experiments are designed to test the proposed assessment system. The performance of the system is compared with manual measurements performed by rehabilitation specialists.
| en_US |