Evaluation of body motion by optical flow analysis

For quantitative evaluation of body motion, a fully noncontact and unconstraining monitoring method was developed by introducing image sequence analysis. A spatiotemporal local optimization method was applied to determine optical flow in the image sequence. The optical flow visualized the apparent velocity field of the entire body motion, including both breast movement of respiration and posture changes in a bed. The experiment was carried out under regulated posture changes and under a sleeping condition by measuring heart rate, respiration and digitized image sequences using a video camera. A temporal increase in heart rate reflected the magnitude of physical activities. We proposed two candidate parameters for evaluation of respiratory and physical activities based on comparison among experimental results. The average of squared motion velocities reflected the magnitude of physical activities. The representative field-averaged component showed a waveform with periodic fluctuation corresponding to that of respiration obtained with a nasal thermistor.