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In physiotherapy, rehabilitation outcome is majorly dependent on the patient continuing exercises at home. To support a continuous and correct execution of exercises composed by the physiotherapist it is important that the patient stays motivated. With the emergence of game consoles such as Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox360 that employ special controllers or camera based motion recognition as means of user input those technologies have also been found to be interesting for other real-life applications. We present a concept to employ the Microsoft Kinect system as means to support patients during physiotherapy exercises at home. The system is intended to allow a physiotherapist to compose an individual set of exercises and to control the correct execution of those exercises through tracking the patient’s motions.

In physiotherapy, rehabilitation outcome is majorly dependent on the patient to continue exercises at home. To support a continuous and correct execution of exercises composed by the physiotherapist it is important that the patient stays motivated. With the emergence of game consoles such as Nintendo Wii, PlayStation Eye or Microsoft Kinect that employ special controllers or camera based motion recognition as means of user input those technologies have also been found to be interesting for other real-life applications such as providing individual physiotherapy exercises and an encouraging rehabilitation routine. Due to the intended use of those motion tracking systems in a computer-game environment it remains questionable if the accuracy of the skeleton joint tracking hardware and algorithms is suflicient for physiotherapy applications. We present a basic evaluation of the joint tracking accuracy where angles between various body extremities calculated by a Kinect system were compared with a high resolution motion capture system. Results show promising results with tracking deviations between 2.7° and 14.2° with a mean of the absolute deviations of 8.7°.