MotionTalk: Personalized home rehabilitation system for assisting patients with impaired mobility

Physical injury, stroke, trauma, traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury rank among the top causes of disability. There are a total of 54 million people in the US requiring rehabilitative assistance of which 15.3 million people are in the age groups of 18-44. However, the compliance rate for patients performing rehabilitation exercises in the home environment is poor. In this paper, we design and prototype a personalized home rehabilitation system, MotionTalk, for the real time quantitative assessment of mobility. Performance of rehabilitation is designed to be assessed using the changes in mobility, reflected in the exercises performed by patients at home with respect to the same exercises performed in the clinic. Our system is capable of capturing motion using Microsoft Kinect and analyzing the position and rotation information to give scores for assessing rehabilitation progress. In comparison to conventional rehabilitation systems, MotionTalk is an inexpensive (<$150 compared to conventional systems costing >$1000), less intrusive and personalized home rehabilitation system, which was developed and tested using data from able-bodied volunteers at Georgia Institute of Technology.