A Portable Vision-Based Head Tracking Exergame Solution for Neck Rehabilitation

Abstract

The current practice of neck rehabilitation is done through laser-pointing devices in a physical setup or Virtual Reality head-mounted devices, whereby the patient will control and navigate a laser beam to follow a specific pattern. These setups are cumbersome to the patient. We propose a portable computer vision-based marker-less head tracking exergame for neck rehabilitation. Our system retargets head postures to control a game object and considers neck mobility while incorporating movement modulation during posture overcompensation. This system would be tailored to the specific patient in the steps of automatic calibration and gameplay interaction. We used the head and body pose to calibrate the game scene dimensions, and the upper body joint angles to feedback the posture over-compensation in the form of gameplay variables augmentation. From our testing, it has shown that this is a viable exergame solution that could be adopted for neck exercise.