Augmented-reality environment for locomotor training in children with neurological injuries

Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/13/2014
4:00 pm

Angelos Barmpoutis, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Digital Worlds Institute & Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, UF

ABSTRACT:

In this talk a novel augmented-reality environment will be presented for enhancing locomotor training. The main goal of this environment is to excite kids for walking and hence facilitate their locomotor therapy and at the same time provide the therapist with a quantitative framework for monitoring and evaluating the progress of the therapy. This paper focuses on the quantitative part of our framework, which uses a depth camera to capture the patient’s body motion. More specifically, the system uses a model-free graph-based segmentation algorithm that detects the regions of the arms and legs in the depth frames. Then, we analyze their motion patterns in real-time by extracting various features such as the pace, length of stride, symmetry of walking pattern, and arm-leg synchronization. Several experimental results will be presented that demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed methods.