Assessing human-human therapy kinematics for retargeting to human-robot therapy

In this paper, we present experiments examining the accuracy of data collected from a Kinect sensor for capturing close interactive actions of a therapist with a patient during stroke rehabilitation. Our long-term goal is to map human-human interactions such as these patient-therapist ones onto human-robot interactions. In many robot interaction scenarios, the robot does not mimic interaction between two or more humans, which is a major part of stroke therapy. The Kinect works for functional tasks such as a reaching task where the interaction to be retargeted by the robot is minimal to none; though this data is not good for a functional task involving touching another person. We demonstrate that the noisy data from Kinect does not produce a system robust enough to be for remapping to a humanoid robot a therapit's movements when in contact with a person.