Assessment of Patient’s Injured Shoulder Based on Digital Motion Acquisition

Orthopedic physicians and physiotherapists deal with rehabilitation processes during which several assessments have to be done to evaluate patients’ progress. Usually, medical personnel assess the improvements through the evaluation of rehabilitation exercises he/she has to do for recovering the physical abilities after an injury or a surgery. Nowadays, the medical evaluation is based on several parameters relative to medical knowledge, which are consolidated by the experience obtained during daily practice but heavily depends on the physicians’ subjectivity. In such a context, technology, such as Motion Capture (Mocap), can represent a valid solution; in fact, human motion tracking is creating new frontiers for potential clinical and home applications. Several inexpensive sensors and software platforms are available; in particular, markerless systems based on low-cost RGB-D sensors, such as Microsoft Kinect v1 and v2, have been adopted both in industrial and medical sectors. The most important step is the domain-dependent data elaboration, which is the bottleneck of the entire process. A multidisciplinary approach is needed to understand which are the right parameters, when they must be considered, and to interpret the results so that final users can be provided exactly with the information they need. In previous works, a general methodology and some applications of rehabilitation supported by motion acquisition technologies were carried.