Balance clinical measurement using RGBD devices

Abstract

RGBD capture devices have been proven as an ICT realistic approach for clinical prevention of falls. RGBD devices facilitate the capture of human movement and are known because of its low cost. According to that, its use is widespread and has been validated in different interactive applications for balance rehabilitation. In this type of rehabilitation, it is very important to have information on clinical patient outcomes. Moreover, it would be helpful to use RGBD devices in case the patient performs the rehabilitation treatment at home because the physiotherapist could use the RGBD devices to assess the balance. This paper demonstrates that the Microsoft Kinect device is reliable and adequate to calculate the standard functional reach test (FRT); one of the most widely used balance clinical measurements. To do so, an experiment was performed on 14 healthy users to compare the FRT calculation manually and using a RGBD device. The results show an average absolute difference of 2.84 cm (±2.62), and there are no statistically significant differences applying a paired t-student test for the data.