A Low-Cost Upper Limb Monitoring System for Post-Stroke Patient Using Kinect

Abstract

Diagnosis and monitoring system is most important part of physical rehabilitation process. In this research, a monitoring system is the main concern to identify the improvement from stroke disabilities. Poststroke patients are required to know the upper limb movement recovery status in order to check the improvement on their post therapy exercises. The movement measurement can be carried out by examining the elbow angle. This paper aims to monitor improvement of the recovery stages for stroke patient with the proposed low-cost system. The system consists of Kinect camera, PC and a software system. Kinect sensor is used to detect human skeleton for the processing of joint angular displacement. This sophisticated technology allows stroke patients to know their level of stroke by measuring the joint angular displacement and angular velocity of patient elbow movement. So, the Kinect system can be installed and used for post stroke patient upper limb movement measurement exercises. The experiment carried out by installing the Kinect V2 on the PC and set it up about 1 meter away from the subject. When the subject lifts hand, the proposed system would detect the angular displacement and angular velocity of patient’s hand motion. The software will then show the improvement stages of the post stroke patient and compare the data between post stroke patient and normal person.