Exploring various orientation measurement approaches applied to a serious game system for functional rehabilitation

Serious games have been established as a complementary tool for conventional rehabilitation. This trend proved to be beneficial for both experts and patients since the first are able to assign and monitor virtual reality games for their patients to be executed at home, and the latter are greatly motivated by the challenges of these games rather than the repeatable and boring rehabilitation movements. In a previous work, we proposed a serious game for lower limb rehabilitation of the musculoskeletal system using the Microsoft KinectTM camera and a virtual environment. However, this system suffers from inaccurate kinematic measurement due to various external sources. Therefore, this paper explores various kinematic measurement technics to improve the accuracy of our system. Six real time orientation measurement algorithms were assessed and compared, using multiple types of sensors. The results obtained showed a better performance for our system. In fact, this study reinforced a clearer view on a low cost, real time portable system to be implemented at home.