A tool to monitor and support physical exercise interventions for MCI and AD patients

This paper presents a tool to support and monitor the execution of common physical exercise interventions targeting people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and elderly in general. Our tool aims (a) to stimulate and guide patients within physical exercise programs, (b) to monitor patient capacity to perform exercises suggested by clinicians, providing objective feedback and (c) to enable early diagnosis of significant changes in the physical capacity of users over time. Our tool incorporates a virtual 3D trainer, demonstrating prescribed exercises; currently, arms lifting, arms stretching, torso bending and twisting are supported. Utilizing a low-cost depth camera and markerless skeletal joint estimation, our tool monitors movement during exercise execution, evaluating patient performance through a set of metrics that we introduce herein. Through preliminary experimental analysis, our metrics were found of significant potential to discriminate among good and bad executions of the currently supported exercises.