Measurement of 3-D Workspace of Thumb Tip with RGB-D Sensor for Quantitative Rehabilitation

Abstract

The three dimensional workspace of the thumb tip, where a thumb tip can reach, is closely related to functions that can be performed by the thumb. However, on the hand and finger rehabilitation, one dimensional range of motion for each joint is manually measured for evaluating the current state of the hand. It requires a therapist to measure the ranges. In addition, it is difficult to evaluate the three dimensional workspace from the one dimensional ranges. We propose a method to automatically estimate three dimensional position of the thumb tip with a contactless depth sensor. To evaluate the relative position to the palm, we also propose a method to estimate three dimensional configuration of the palm. With experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method.