Virtual 3D Web Environment for Posture Design in Rehabilitation Using Kinect

Healthcare environments are considered an important scenario where new technologies play an important role in improving the rehabilitation process. Many software applications provide a way to rehabilitate patients and some of them also provide a degree of customization. Nevertheless, the physiotherapist is not always able to create new exercises and adapt them to the needs of a wide range of different patients. In this paper, we present an advanced proposal which primarily aims to provide the therapist with a tool for intuitive and easy design of specific rehabilitation postures for specific patients. The system consists of a skeleton in a virtual 3D environment which is composed of different joints with which the physiotherapist can interact in order to achieve the desired posture. It is also possible to design postures using Microsoft Kinect device thanks to its motion and voice interaction. Using 3D and Kinect device presents a number of development challenges that the authors have had to resolve, including movement of joints in the 3D space, the correlated movement of the different joints and matching within Kinect. Due to its development within a Web environment, these, and other features, make the system a powerful and place-independent tool.