Avatar-Facilitated Therapy and Virtual Reality: Next-Generation of Functional Rehabilitation Methods

The control of a synthetic human body, or Avatar, is an essential step before the animation process. These two important stages (control and animation) are applied in diverse areas, including video games and 3D animation films. Avatars deserve particular consideration in virtual reality (VR) applications as they represent a fundamental mechanism for interacting with a virtual environment. Avatar’s animation require a precise tracking of the user’s movements, that must be faithfully replicated, in the 3D scenes, by avatars. The control of the ability to animate the upper or lower limbs articulation of the human body, in 3D scenes, is a rather complex task, due to the movements to be reproduced with exact closure, by the avatar, while tracking them by using a camera sensor. These problems are mainly associated with the 3D design of the human body joints and the exact reproduction of anthropomorphic properties in virtual scenes. This article presents an original framework capable of capturing and reproducing, in real time, the same movements provided by humans, using a Microsoft Kinect camera in virtual landscapes. The proposal concentrates on human’s posture failures monitoring by avatars, to improve the posture of people, in rehabilitation stages (victims of stroke or mobility impairment). These scenes contain real motion capture data, which helps to solve postural problems of persons with physical disabilities. Experiments prove the flexibility of the proposed model. During the evaluation phase, we set different scenarios, for an extended analysis of patients’ movements through those of avatars.