Personalized Balance and Fall Risk Visualization with Kinect Two

When we face a super-aging society, there is a drastically increased need for efficient systems in terms of time and cost that can improve rehabilitation standards for the elderly people and other motor-impaired subjects. Human balance ability depends largely on the control of the full body center of mass (CoM), fall risks can be evaluated by estimating the subject-specific CoM displacement over the support polygon relating to the foot tracking. The CoM position is often estimated using what are known as anthropometric tables in biomechanics field. However, the parameters have been obtained from a standard population and will differ between subjects. Current existing fall risk assessment usually relies on the generic anthropometric table or need the center of pressure (CoP) recordings which are to be evaluated for the risk of fall. CoP measurements require force platform, wii board or specialized shoes, which limits the practical usage in the daily life environment. This work represents a personalized measure of balance that considers subject-specific body mass variations along with the motion tracking by Kinect Two. Based on our previous developments, we firstly verified the system with Kinect Two recording, and with adaptive support polygon extraction process, it realizes a real-time system for evaluating the personalized balance and fall risk visualization for unknown disturbance without needing force platform.