Hand tracking and trajectory analysis for physical rehabilitation

In this work we present a framework for physical rehabilitation, which is based on hand tracking. One particular requirement in physical rehabilitation is the capability of the patient to correctly reproduce a specific path, following an example provided by the medical staff. Currently, these assignments are typically performed manually, and a nurse or doctor, who supervises the correctness of the movement, constantly assists the patient throughout the whole rehabilitation process. With the proposed system, our aim is to provide medical institutions and patients with a low-cost and portable instrument to automatically assess the rehabilitation improvements. To evaluate the performance of the exercise, and to determine the distance between the trial and the reference path, we adopted the dynamic time warping (DTW) and the longest common sub-sequence (LCSS) as discriminating metrics. Trajectories and numerical values are then stored to track the history of the patient and appraise the improvements of the rehabilitation process over time. Thanks to the tests conducted with real patients, it has been possible to evaluate the quality of the proposed tool, in terms of both graphical interface and functionalities.