Virtual Web Environment to Design Rehabilitation Exercises through Movement-Based Interaction

Over time society has become increasingly dependent on technology, and healthcare environments are an example of this. Many software applications provide a way to rehabilitate patients and some of them also provide some kind 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 whose main goal is to provide the therapist with a tool for the intuitive and easy design of specific rehabilitation exercises for specific patients. Customization is an important feature of the system as it allows the therapist to adapt the exercises to the characteristics of each of their patients, in other words it offers not only customization, but personalization. The system allows the creation of exercises through a virtual environment featuring a skeleton composed of 3D joints with which the physiotherapist can interact. It is also possible to design postures using the Microsoft Kinect device thanks to its motion and voice interaction. The use of 3D and the Kinect device presents a number of development challenges that the authors have had to address, including the movement of joints in 3D space, the correlated movement of the different joints and matching them within Kinect. Due to the fact that it has been developed as a web-based application, these, and other features, make the system a powerful and place-independent tool.