Gaming for upper extremities rehabilitation

This paper presents a hand motion capture system. Its application is a wearable controller for an upper extremities rehabilitation game. The system consists of a wearable data glove platform (SmartGlove, a customized finger pressure, bending, and 9DOM motion extraction platform) and a 3D camera vision device (Kinect [1], vision based game controller supplied by Microsoft) to extract detailed upper extremities parameters as gaming inputs. The testing application is a jewel thief game [2] implemented with C# and Unity, which requires the tester, such as a stroked patient with upper extremities disabilities to perform a series of predefined upper extremities movements to accomplish the assigned jewel grasping tasks. The parameters and timing could recorded during the gaming process for further medical analysis. This system is targeted on lowering the cost of rehabilitating impaired limbs, providing remote patient monitoring, and acting as a natural interface for gaming systems. In addition, the extracted parameters can be exploited to reconstruct of an accurate model of the patient's limbs and body. Therefore, the proposed system can provide remote medical staffs a wide variety of information to aid a patient's rehabilitation, including, but not limited to aiding in progress evaluations and direct rehabilitative exercises and entertainment.