The implementation of a kinect-based postural assessment system

In some hospitals, rehabilitation professionals usually adopt the visual assessment incorporated with some posture charts to assess whether a patient has good postures while he or she is standing still or stretching some joints. While the advantages of the visual assessment are its simplicity and no need of expensive equipment, its disadvantages are imprecise, subjective, inefficient, etc. In this paper, we report the implement of a Kinect-based postural assessment system which is able to perform postural assessment and create an analysis report with 62 measurements including 22 angles, 35 distances, and 5 postural rotations. Based on the proposed Kinect-based postural assessment system, rehabilitation specialists are then able to objectively assess the treatment effect after each individual course of treatment. Some experiments were designed to measure the accuracy of the proposed system to verify whether it has the potential of being adopted at hospitals.