Supporting Rehabilitation Process with Novel Motion Capture Analysis Method

Our method presented in this paper is capable to analyze the kinematic chain of upper body joints jointly by comparing two motion capture recordings of persons performing the same exercise. We did not utilize motion derivatives like velocity or acceleration but rather analyze the hand trajectory and then, basing on maxima found in aligned motion paths we detect most important differences between template and input recording in hands kinematic chain. The found differences indicate which body joints caused deviation from the reference path. We have recorded several exercises using motion capture technology (MoCap) that can be used to visualize the injuries of upper body. Among them is cuff muscle pain and shoulder injurie. The same exercise was performed by a healthy subject and persons suffering some minor injuries. In order to evaluate the proposed method we have applied it to our dataset. We then maid visualizations of obtained result and confront them with disabilities that those persons suffered. The visualization results of evaluated MoCap correspond with disabilities of analyzed persons. The research presented in this paper proves that the proposed method is useful for evaluation of upper body motion analysis. The method beside the numerical results enables to generate valuable visualizations that can be used to perform three-dimensional evaluation and comparison of motion ranges between subjects. This approach can be applied for example to support rehabilitation process.