Many hospitals and homes for elderly use ceiling hoist for assisted gait training of patients with mobility difficulties.  Physiotherapists assess and prescribe training sessions to individual patients with very simple record such as whether the training has been carried out and how long the training lasted.

To enhance the monitor of these training sessions, accurate measurement of user performance and recording is needed to facilitate daily training and monitor progress of each individual.  In some hospitals, sophisticated equipments were installed for this purpose.  However, many other organizations might not have the budget for such large-scale system and hence a more inexpensive tool is needed to serve the same purpose. 

With the aid of motion sensing system, we hope to build a system which can identify users, measure and record distance walked, time spent, cadence of steps, length of steps and other relevant data for better quality care and control.  With the collection of these data, further analysis can be carried out by the system to assist physiotherapists in examining the performance of each individual or each session.

 

In physiotherapy world, there are many standard tests to determine ones’ mobility. For example, Berg Balance Scale4, Elderly Mobility Scale5, Six-Minute Walk Test6 etc. All of these provide an objective scale and conclusion to the performance of the participants. With the help of Kinect, the testing process can be recorded accurately and automatically, and it will be stored in database and be processed later.