Lubos Omelina

Validity and reliability of the Kinect within functional assessment activities: comparison with standard stereophotogrammetry.

The recent availability of the Kinect™ sensor, a cost-effective markerless motion capture system (MLS), offers interesting possibilities in clinical functional analysis and rehabilitation. However, neither validity nor reproducibility of this device is known yet. These two parameters were evaluated in this study. Forty-eight volunteers performed shoulder abduction, elbow flexion, hip abduction and knee flexion motions; the same protocol was repeated one week later to evaluate reproducibility. Movements were simultaneously recorded by the Kinect (with Microsoft Kinect SDK v.1.5) MLS and a traditional marker-based stereophotogrammetry system (MBS). Considering the MBS as reference, discrepancies between MLS and MBS were evaluated by comparing the range of motion (ROM) between both systems. MLS reproducibility was found to be statistically similar to MBS results for the four exercises. Measured ROMs however were found different between the systems.

The use of commercial video games in rehabilitation: a systematic review

The aim of this paper was to investigate the effect of commercial video games (VGs) in physical rehabilitation of motor functions. Several databases were screened (Medline, SAGE Journals Online, and ScienceDirect) using combinations of the following free-text terms: commercial games, video games, exergames, serious gaming, rehabilitation games, PlayStation, Nintendo, Wii, Wii Fit, Xbox, and Kinect. The search was limited to peer-reviewed English journals. The beginning of the search time frame was not restricted and the end of the search time frame was 31 December 2015. Only randomized controlled trial, cohort, and observational studies evaluating the effect of VGs on physical rehabilitation were included in the review. A total of 4728 abstracts were screened, 275 were fully reviewed, and 126 papers were eventually included. The following information was extracted from the selected studies: device type, number and type of patients, intervention, and main outcomes. The integration of VGs into physical rehabilitation has been tested for various pathological conditions, including stroke, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, balance training, weight loss, and aging. There was large variability in the protocols used (e.g. number of sessions, intervention duration, outcome measures, and sample size). The results of this review show that in most cases, the introduction of VG training in physical rehabilitation offered similar results as conventional therapy. Therefore, VGs could be added as an adjunct treatment in rehabilitation for various pathologies to stimulate patient motivation. VGs could also be used at home to maintain rehabilitation benefits.

Can serious games be incorporated with conventional treatment of children with cerebral palsy? A review.

The use of video games in rehabilitation is becoming more popular to clinicians. These games are embedded in off-the-shelf commercial entertainment applications or especially-developed for clinical purposes. Treatment of cerebral palsy (CP) children is a challenging task for clinicians. Lack of motivation and progress monitoring are two important factors clinicians need to deal with. The use of serious games (SG), sometimes referred to as Virtual Rehabilitation (VR), could therefore be an interesting adjuvant to conventional treatment for these patients. This is however a new discipline and many scientific issues remain to be solved. The aim of this paper is to describe available conventional treatment for CP children together with the level of evidence of each approach. A systematic review of the use of SG in rehabilitation is then conducted. 31 papers (7 randomized clinical trials, 16 cohort studies and 8 single-cases studies) were selected and analyzed, and their level of evidence compared to the conventional treatment. These studies reported outcomes for 352 patients. In summary, this review shows that it is difficult to compare those studies despite the large amount of patients. This is due to the lack of standardization in patient rehabilitation strategy and to the use of various clinical scales and scores. This non-standardization in patient follow-up between previously-published works make evidence-based conclusions difficult to obtain in order to support these techniques objectively. The use of SG for rehabilitation purposes currently meets similar issues. This paper proposes standardization strategies in order to improve treatment comparison and SG use in rehabilitation.

Validation of the Balance Board for Clinical Evaluation of Balance During Serious Gaming Rehabilitation Exercises

BACKGROUND Balance and posture can be affected in various conditions or become decreased with aging. A diminution of balance control induces an increase of falls risk. INTRODUCTION The Nintendo Wii Balance Board™ (WBB) is used in rehabilitation to perform balance exercises (using commercial video games). The WBB has also been validated to assess balance and posture in static conditions. However, there is currently no study investigating the use of WBB to assess balance during the realization of balance exercises using this device. The aim of this study was to validate the use of WBB, coupled with specially developed serious games, to assess dynamic balance during rehabilitation exercises. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty five subjects participated in this study. Subjects were asked to play two specially developed serious games. Center of pressure (CP) displacements were simultaneously recorded with a WBB and a gold standard force plate (FP). Nine parameters were derived from CP displacement. Bland and Altman plots, paired-sample t tests, intraclass correlation coefficients, and Pearsons coefficient correlations were computed. RESULTS Excellent correlation between both devices was found for each parameter for the two games (R = 0.95 and 0.96). DISCUSSION Unlike previous work on the WBB, these excellent results were obtained without using any calibration procedure. Despite this, results were highly correlated between the WBB and the FP. CONCLUSIONS The WBB could be used in clinics to assess balance during rehabilitation exercises and, thus, allows a more regular patient follow-up.

Patient follow-up using Serious Games. A feasibility study on low back pain patients.

Low Back Pain (LBP) is one of the most frequent pathologies related to musculoskeletal disorders. Patients suffering from LBP must perform rehabilitation exercises in order to avoid chronic disorder. At the beginning these exercises are performed with physiotherapists during rehabilitation. A major part of the treatment need to be performed at home by the patient himself. Serious Games (SG) could be used to increase patients’ motivation and to be sure that patients are performing these exercises and most important that they are doing it in the right way. A specific SG was created for LBP patients. Motions performed during the game are recorded and parameters (range of motion, speed, coupled motion) are processed. The aim of this feasibility study was to evaluate the intra and inter day reproducibility of this system to evaluate whether or not it can be used in daily practice for following the evolution of the patient and for scoring the severity of disorders.

Face recognition methods for multimodal interface

In this paper we provide a comparative study of several conventional face recognition methods (PCA, KPCA, GDA, SVM and RBF) that are suitable to work properly in multimodal systems. Performance of these systems is often influenced by various negative effects of the real-world environment. We evaluate the influence of varying illuminations and pose of faces on face recognition accuracy. Based on the results of our experiments we select the most suitable face recognition methods for application in HBB-NEXT project. This project wants to lay the foundations for advanced hybrid multiuser services.

Balance improvement after physical therapy training using specially developed serious games for cerebral palsy children: preliminary results

Abstract Purpose: Cerebral palsy (CP) leads to various clinical signs mainly induced by muscle spasticity and muscle weakness. Among these ones impaired balance and posture are very common. Traditional physical therapy exercise programs are focusing on this aspect, but it is difficult to motivate patients to regularly perform these exercises, especially at home without therapist supervision. Specially developed serious games (SG) could therefore be an interesting option to motivate children to perform specific exercise for balance improvement. Method: Ten CP children participated in this study. Patients received four sessions of SG included into conventional therapy (1 session of 30 min a week during 4 weeks). Trunk control and balance were assessed using Trunk Control Motor Scale (TCMS) before and after interventions. Results: Children presented a significant improvement in TCMS global score after interventions [37.6 (8.7) and 39.6 (9.5) before and after interventions, respectively, p = 0.04]. Conclusion: SG could therefore be an interesting option to integrate in the conventional treatment of CP children. Implication for Rehabilitation Cerebral palsy (CP) leads to balance issues. Rehabilitation exercises are not performed (enough) at home. Serious games (SG) could increase patients’ motivation. SG increase balance control of CP children.

Feature Extraction for Iris Recognition Based on Optimized Convolution Kernels

Iris recognition has gained a lot of popularity for the last decades. Mainly a method based on binary iris templates found its way to real world use due to its simplicity, stability and reliability. The principle is that the unique iris structure is encoded to the bit code templates that are sufficient for high accuracy recognition. Encoding is performed by filtering a preprocessed iris image and storing only the phase information of the response to the filters. For years researchers used the 2D Gabor filters or their modifications, because these filters proved to provide the most reliable features. Despite the high recognition accuracy, the use of 2D Gabor filters faces a problem of spoofing. Recent studies show that the encoding process can be reverted and a spoofed iris can be obtained only based on the iris code. In this paper, we propose an efficient feature extraction method for iris recognition based on convolution kernels, learned from a database of irises. We show that the proposed method reaches state-of-the-art performance and can prohibit attackers from generating spoofed irises if the optimized convolution kernel is safely stored.

Suitability of functional evaluation embedded in serious game rehabilitation exercises to assess motor development across lifespan

The aim of this study was to determine if the results of activities performed using specially developed serious games for physical rehabilitation could be used as an indicator of the natural maturation and decline of motor control in healthy participants. Eighty-one participants (19 children (5-15 years old), 40 adults (18-65 years old) and 22 aged subjects (60-88 years old) participated in this study. Motions performed were recorded using the Kinect sensor. Three different exercises embedded in the games were used to assess upper limb, trunk and lower limb control. The trial duration and accuracy, measures of gross motor function and fine motor control, respectively, were computed for each participant. ANOVA tests shows statistically significant differences between the three groups for duration (53±15, 27±10 and 119±30s for children, adults and elderly subjects respectively) and accuracy (87±5, 89±10 and 70±8% for children, adults and elderly subjects respectively). The slopes of the curves that approximated the evolution of the performance over various ages are coherent with previous studies about motor control development and physiological decline. The proposed solution, i.e. serious games rehabilitation exercises coupled to motion analysis, seems to be an interesting tool to assess global motor function. Further studies are needed to study the influence of pathologies on the studied parameters.

Validation of trunk kinematics analysis through serious games rehabilitation exercises using the Kinect™ sensor

Low Back Pain (LBP) is one of the most frequent musculoskeletal pathology. There is, currently, a lack of affordable and easy to use assessment tool for these patients. For the moment such kind of evaluation tool are limited to gait analysis center. Management of LBP included physiotherapy and exercises that patients need to perform at-home. The use of serious games (games with a primary purpose other than pure entertainment) in the treatment of LBP patients is becoming more and more popular. Therefore the aim of this paper was to develop and validate a biomechanical analysis of trunk motion during rehabilitation exercises. Results obtained with the Kinect™ sensor were compared with results obtained using state-of-the-art optoelectronic device. Different score have also been developed in order to assess in a clinically relevant way the motions performed by the patients at-home exercises that need to be performed by the patients during conventional rehabilitation program or during telerehabilitation.