Natural User Interfaces in the Motor Development of Disabled Children

Abstract

Natural User Interfaces have been widely used in the past few years in an ever growing range of contexts, including activities relying in body motion tracking, with an overall positive outcome. This thesis goals were to understand how to address a framework based upon body tracking devices and aimed at assisting children with motor impairments, as well as understanding what positive contribute it could deliver for their rehabilitation process. A state of the art study regarding the most relevant devices and frameworks is addressed, and the most beneficial combination of these technologies is selected and detailed, including the emerged benefits and constraints. This enabled a better understanding of the motor disorders that could take advantage of the technological specifications, as well as the types of exercise appropriate for this context. The collaboration of Occupational Therapists in this process was significant in providing information that helped defining the framework's targeting and the exercises more commonly addressed in rehabilitation sessions. A framework was developed that enabled to collect results based upon mimicking the moves of a previously recorded exercise. The architecture, design and implementation processes were done on an iterative and incremental basis, and were influenced by the technological exploration and targeting analysis results, all of these thoroughly described in the document. The results obtained by the tests conducted during the validation process evidence that the data collected regarding the user performance is related with their impairment condition and denote certain motor patterns of the disorder. However, a few detection and tracking issues in more complex exercises affected the relevance of the collected data, thus indicating that the device selected for this project can be applied in a real context to assist in rehabilitation sessions, but requiring additional evaluation metrics to support the obtained results.