Combination of the Kinect with Virtual Reality in Balance Training for the Elderly
Wei-Min Hsieh, Chih-Chen Chen, Shih-Chuan Wang, Yu-Luen Chen, Yuh-Shyan Hwang, Jin-Shin Lai
Department of Computer Science, National Taipei University of Education, Taipei, Chinese Taipei.
Department of Computer Science, National Taipei University of Education, Taipei, Chinese Taipei Department of Information Management, St. Mary’s Medicine, Nursing and Management College, Yilan, Chinese Taipei.
Department of Electronic Engineering & Institute of Computer and Communication, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Chinese Taipei.
Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, National Taiwan University Hospital,Taipei, Chinese Taipei.
Graduate Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Chinese Taipei Department of Electronic Engineering, Hwa Hsia Institute of Technology, Taipei, Chinese Taipei.
Management Information System, Hwa Hsia Institute of Technology, Taipei, Chinese Taipei.
DOI: 10.4236/eng.2013.510B037   PDF    HTML     4,059 Downloads   6,144 Views   Citations

Abstract

Daily life movements such as standing, walking, and jumping need balance ability to achieve. Good balance control is closely related to the body stability and its development. According to medical research, people showing dizziness after taking drugs may have their balance ability substantially affected, and are more likely to fall, especially true to the elderly. This study proposes the combination of Kinect with virtual reality to build an information platform of interactive scenarios, for practices and evaluation on balance ability. Based on the indicators of balance ability, this platform sets out various training activities to improve the balance ability, making the supposedly boring process fun and vivid for a much better training purposes. Also, according to literatures, training with gaming patterns results in 30% reduction of falls. What’s more, this type of training can have the data, like time of use, scores, and joint postures, recorded and sent through network to databases on remote computer servers. The data collected from this platform can be sorted and analyzed, and the results can then be used to evaluate the performance of the balance training, and referenced for follow-up planning in the future.


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Hsieh, W. , Chen, C. , Wang, S. , Chen, Y. , Hwang, Y. and Lai, J. (2013) Combination of the Kinect with Virtual Reality in Balance Training for the Elderly. Engineering, 5, 171-175. doi: 10.4236/eng.2013.510B037.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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