Evaluation Of Physical Therapy Through Analysis Of Depth Images

Abstract

The support through robots in orthopaedic rehabilitation is an opportunity to relieve physiotherapists. However, to be able to provide a control in the robot-patient cooperation in the therapy process a certain standard in interpreting the exercise has to be established. In this paper we present an evaluation approach of the health subject performance in a tibiofemoral rehabilitation on the example of squat exercises. The proposed method utilizes only depth images for the performance evaluation and any human-robot interaction system for the performance correction. Thus, this method can be easily applied to a mobile service robot in the robot-aided physical therapy. The patient is observed while performing the exercise and the motion is evaluated and segmented using Motion History Images. Concrete, depth images are used to monitor local points of interest on the performer during the exercise. The proposed approach was evaluated on custom image sequences with a multitude of varying subjects and shows the suitable performance for assisting in the correctness of the exercise execution.