Playing computer games for isolated breathing therapy

Breathing (pulmonary ventilation) is one of the physiological needs for humans. Incorrect breathing habits negatively influence quality of our lives and are often considered as one of “civilization diseases”. As such, it is practically impossible to assure a day-to-day rehabilitation for majority of patients. Recently, there has been a significant progress in development of computer games for rehabilitation. In this paper, we propose the first automatic method for the isolated breathing therapy. Our method uses relatively cheap sensor and does not require any time consuming or difficult calibration. Hence it can be widely used for rehabilitation at home on a daily basis. We asses the quality of various affordable depth cameras for isolated breathing therapy, design the fully automatic method for the therapy and compare our method with previous (manual) approaches.