Motion Capture for Clinical Purposes, an Approach Using PrimeSense Sensors

Virtual Reality (VR) is the computer recreation of simulated environments that create on the user a sense of physical presence on them. VR provides the advantages of being highly flexible and controllable, allowing experts to generate the optimal conditions for any given test and isolating any desired variables in the course of an experiment. An important characteristic of VR is that it allows interaction within the virtual world. Motion capture is one of the most popular technologies, because it contributes to creating in the subject the required sense of presence. There are several methods to incorporate these techniques into VR system, with the challenge of them not being too invasive. We propose a method using PrimeSense sensors and several well-known computer vision techniques to build a low-cost mocap system that has proven to be valid for clinical needs, in its application as a support therapy for Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients.

keywords: motion capture, prime sense, Kinect, Parkinson, inverse kinematics, virtual reality