Quantitation of Body Movement in a Motor Physical Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

The present work shows the quantitation of body movement in a motor physical therapy for Parkinson’s Disease (PD). In recent years, many activities of therapy were carried out remotely using common RGB cameras to capture the body movements. We analyze the body movements of 8 subjects with clinical diagnosis of PD, and compare them with a control group of 11 healthy volunteers, processing their respective RGB video recordings with a software that identifies 17 specific body keypoints while subjects perform two motor rehabilitation therapies (cervical and lumbar spine). All videos were analyzed by OpenPose algorithm and angles from keypoints detected were computed to infer the rotation, rate and amplitude of movement of head, shoulder, back and pelvis. The results show that OpenPose algorithm could be used in a home environment specially in follow-up and management of the motor rehabilitation therapy for Parkinson’s disease.