Kinect-based Rehabilitation System for Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the leading causes of death and disability in the age group of 0 - 44 years. Though physical exercises have proven benefits in the rehabilitation process, the compliance rate of patients in the home environment is poor. In this paper we propose a system, MotionTalk, which captures and analyses motion data acquired using Microsoft Kinect. It is designed to give a real time quantitative assessment of the exercises performed by TBI patients at home with respect to the same exercises performed in the clinic by utilizing relatively inexpensive contactless sensing and dynamic programming techniques. In comparison to previous reminder systems, wearable systems, and motion capture systems, MotionTalk is less intrusive in nature and inexpensive to deploy at home because it is based on readily available hardware. This was developed and tested on able bodied volunteers and in the future we hope to test it on patients with TBI, after IRB approval.