Computer aid assessment of muscular imbalance for preventing overuse injuries in athletes

Abstract

Practicing and playing a sport causes athletes' bodies to adapt to the movements they regularly perform. Unfortunately, this can cause muscle imbalances, which might impair performance or worse, cause an injury. It is always best to find the root cause of a muscle imbalance, and to make a precise effort to fix it. Muscle imbalance shouldn't be taken lightly-it could create bigger problems, from posture to spinal positioning, which can ultimately lead to issues in walking, sitting and even lying down, as time progresses. However, muscle imbalances can't be easily evaluated using X-rays, CT scans, or other high-tech devices. But it's possible to address the problem in other ways. In general, the "strong" muscle is measured against the "weaker" muscle. Using the infrared (IR) camera, Kinect can recognize users and track their skeletons in the field of view of the sensor. Kinect sensor can locate the joints of the tracked users in space and track their movements over time. This allows Kinect sensor to recognize people (postures) and follow their actions (movements). Hence, the primary aim of this research is to investigate patterns of muscle imbalance among athletes and evaluate those patterns based on the posture, balance, gait and movement variations using Kinect sensor. Ideally the expected outcome of this research would be a physically meaningful & robust method to identify the muscle imbalance of an athlete.