A Vision-Based System for Movement Analysis in Medical Applications: The Example of Parkinson Disease

• Published in: Computer Vision Systems Vol. 9163; pp. 424 - 434
• Main Authors: Spasojević, Sofija, Santos-Victor, José, Ilić, Tihomir, Milanović, Slađan, Potkonjak, Veljko, Rodić, Aleksandar
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2015; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Graphics programming; Image processing; Kinect; Medical applications; Movement analysis; Pattern recognition
• ISBN: 9783319209036; 3319209035
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20904-3_38

We present a vision-based approach for analyzing a Parkinson patient’s movements during rehabilitation treatments. We describe therapeutic movements using relevant quantitative measurements, which can be applied both for diagnosis and monitoring of the disease progress. Since our long-term goal is to develop an affordable and portable system, suitable for home usage, we use the Kinect device for data acquisition. All recorded exercises are approved by neurologists and therapists and designed to examine the presence of characteristic symptoms caused by neurological disorders. In this study, we focus on Parkinson’s patients in the early stages of the disease. Our approach underlines relevant rehabilitation measurements and allows to determine which ones are more informative for separating healthy from non-healthy subjects. Finally, we propose the symmetry ratio, well known in motor control, as a novel feature that can be extracted from rehabilitation exercises and used in the decision-making (diagnosis support) and monitoring procedures.