Physical therapy has been widely adopted to treat a wide range of medical conditions, from disabilities, injuries, to crippling diseases such as arthritis, lower back pain, or cerebral palsy. A central issue in physical therapy is the assessment of a patient's kinematic performance. With technology advancement, physical therapists can now utilize commercial motion capture (mocap) system to quantify the 3D mechanics common to many conditions they treat. The 3D kinematic feedback leads to more accurate diagnosis and faster progression. Unfortunately the current state of the art for technology to measure 3D motion is expensive, cumbersome, and not widely available to physical therapists. Thus a strong need remains for the development of a portable, low cost, mocap system to give physical therapists precise 3D measurements of movement dysfunction.
This research aims to use the depth information from a single depth camera (SDC) to capture high-accuracy motion data comparable to that from a commercial mocap system. While depth-camera-based pose tracking solutions exist, such as the Kinect system from Microsoft, medical assessment demands almost an order-high accuracy than that for digital entertainment. Based on prior medical studies, this project's goal is to achieve a positional error of less than 10mm and angular error less than 1 degree. That is four to 10 times better than the current state of the art in SDC mocap. For the scope of this project, a new motion capture framework will be developed and thoroughly evaluated for medical applications, in particular to help physician, physical therapists, and other medical professionals to diagnosis, treat, and monitor patients with movement disorders in the lower-extremity.
