ABSTRACT
Introduction:
As the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus as a pandemic in March 2020, physical therapy is more difficult to execute, and social distancing is mandatory in the healthcare sector.
Objective:
In physical therapy, an online video analysis software that provides real-time graphic and numerical information about the patient’s movement executions without direct personal contact would mean a significant improvement in eHealth treatment.
Methods:
We have developed a software layer on top of OpenPose human body position estimation software that can extract the time series of angles of arbitrary body parts using the output coordinates from OpenPose processing the data recorded by two cameras simultaneously. To validate the procedure of determining the joint angles using the Openpose software we have used the Kinovea software.
Results:
The comparison of the determined maximal knee angle in our and the Kinovea software, which is widely used in biomechanical measurements, was not significantly different (2.03±1.06°, p<0.05)
Conclusion:
This indicates, that the developed software can calculate the appropriate joint angles with the accuracy that physiotherapy treatments require. As, to our knowledge no such software yet exists, with the help of this software development, therapists could control and correct the exercises in real-time, and also from a distance, and physical therapy effectiveness could be increased. Level of Evidence II; Experimental, comparative.
Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence; Computational Neural Networks; eHealth; Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine; Social Distancing
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