The Neurorehabilitation Training Toolkit (NTT) goes kinect!

Recently we had a public event in Casa das Mudas (click here to see images of this modern museum) where we had the opportunity to show our work to some school kids of the region of Madeira. This was the perfect occasion to get the Kinect version of the Neurorehabilitation Training Toolkit (NTT) to see the public light. 

The NTT is an upper limb motor rehabilitation system that we have developed for post-stroke rehabilitation. Over time we have developed many interfaces to the NTT. It originally used the AR toolkit to recognize the position of two physical handles, which were then used as intefaces to control a virtual glider by means of arm movements. We also interfaced the NTT to the mpower 1000 robotic orthosis of Myomo Inc. Later we extended the concept to work with two simultaneous USB mice, what allowed us to make the NTT available for free and hosted online without any special hardware requirement here.  At this moment Athanasios, who is doing a PhD in our research group, has been working for over half a year on new motor and cognitive training tasks to be implemented in the context of the RehabNet project. Lots of technological developments have taken place, and one of them is the development of the RehabNet Control Panel.

The RehabNet CP is a tool that we have developed to be able to run our current and future rehabilitation systems using virtually any interface technology, such as for instance the kinect, tracking software (AnTS), brain computer interfaces (BCI) and any device that is compliant with the VRPN communication protocol. What you can see in the above video is the RehabNet CP interfaced with the NTT as we demoed it last week. At the moment the RehabNet CP is still a laboratory prototype that we are expecting one day (hopefully sooner than later) to be making available to the community to be used in conjunction with the NTT or any other compatible software. The RehabNet CP will allow anybody with a MS kinect device, Emotiv BCI, android mobile phone, etc... to use them with our online rehabilitation software. That is, without the need to download or install anything in your PC except for RehabNet CP.

Of course, kids enjoyed playing the NTT using the MS kinect as we expect you to be able to do soon. Come again and check for the first release of the RehabNet CP!!