Evaluation and Measurements of Kinect Movement Detection in Physical Therapy

The Kinect device is commonly associated to videogames, but this is not the only purpose of this device. Going into more depth, it could be a powerful tool to accomplish several goals, not only related to simple games. One such example could be Serious Games. Above all, Kinect device is a group of sensors and as such it is an attraction point in order to do experiments and measurements. This thesis tries to understand the potentiality and specifically tries to understand the precision and accuracy in the explicit area of rehabilitation. Taking advantage of the Kinect functionality, the thesis tries to enter in a young area, composed by two principal field of interest: catching and recognizing movements without the help of tool to wear, and the movements in order to do physical therapy. The result of this thesis is that the accuracy and precision of the Kinect device is sufficient for detecting therapeutic movements. Further work is however needed to be able to use Kinect for automatic discrimination of correct and incorrect physical movements.