Computer-assisted hand rehabilitation assessment using an optical motion capture system

Abstract

Rehabilitation assessment plays an important role in helping injured patients to recover quickly and smoothly. It is a cross-disciplinary field that involves many subjects including medical sciences, computer science, electrical engineering, robotics and so forth. Recently, many studies have been conducted in computer-assisted physical rehabilitation assessment, and motion capture techniques are increasingly used in this field. As such, the focus of this work is on computer-assisted hand rehabilitation assessment using an optical motion capture system. With the proposed scheme, we first capture the motion of a hand using the Vicon motion capture system and store the data in a file. Then, the file is read, visualized and manipulated in an application that we have developed. The application is able to analyze the dynamic range of motion (ROM) by computing the angles between geometric units formed by hand markers as specified by the user. According to our experiments, the application that we have developed measures ROMs with high accuracy for several key hand joints. In addition, the doctors and patients who have tried using our application feel that it is easy and intuitive to use and yields clear and accurate displays of the hand motion animation.