Researchers in health and life sciences always look for ways to better analyze and track patient’s movement patterns, provide effective rehabilitation programs that improve motor impairments and alleviate medical challenges concerning many diseases. Researchers try to find new ways for more precise diagnoses, finely balanced medication and therapies with high patient’s acceptance. One thing is key for these people: looking beyond own industry boundaries. Expert teams get new inspiration for their disciplines and benefit from each other’s innovations to accelerate solutions and reduce development costs.

An impressive example is the current interdisciplinary medical research & development around Microsoft Kinect for Windows. The latest Kinect for Windows 2.0 SDK provides companies and developers with everything they need to create interactive applications that respond to gesture, voice, and movement using Kinect for Windows. With this, a device well-known among the X-Box gaming community, Kinect becomes a crucial part for medical cure development.

Improved Medical Diagnosis With Machine Learning
One project is ASSESS MS, a collaboration with Novartis Pharmaceutical and three large research hospitals in Europe focused on Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Using Kinect and advanced machine learning techniques to track disease progression in MS patients, ASSESS MS leads patients through an exercise program – playfully like a video game but precisely as medical systems need to be. The development of the system has leveraged a number of strengths of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. The Human Experience Design team worked to design a prototype that fit within the expectations of clinical workflow, but also collected the high quality data needed for optimal machine learning. The Machine Learning and Perception team has focused on developing algorithms that can detect very subtle changes in “noisy” data.

The driver behind this system: Reliable and standardized disease tracking. This is essential in the drug discovery process, as clinical trials require consistent measures to understand whether new treatments are working. It is thought that a decrease in the measure variance in Multiple Sclerosis by a factor of 2, could reduce the number of patients needed in a clinical trial by a factor of 4. This could substantially decrease the cost and time to market for new drugs.

Currently Multiple Sclerosis disease tracking is done through clinical examination, in which a neurologist watches a patient perform a number of exercises, such as touching the finger to the nose, and then rates the level of motor abnormality. However, the high variance in judgements between neurologists, or the same neurologist at different time points, makes it difficult to track disease progression reliably.

Kinect For Diagnosis and Therapy
This crucial issue in diagnosis led also the Charitè University Medicine in Berlin, Germany, to evaluate feasibility of computerized versions of classic neurological tests by a novel non-invasive, real-time movement analysis using Microsoft Kinect. It is about to identify and analyze disease-specific movement patterns in MS patients and to compare findings in MS patients with those in age and gender matched healthy controls (HC). Their data suggests that combined video- and depth-based assessments to be a fast, non-invasive, feasible and well-tolerated method to detect even subtle clinical alterations in gait, posture, and trunk and extremity coordination. As an inexpensive method it has the potential to complement neurological examination and established clinical assessments.

There are many examples of projects where organizations pursue a therapy approach using Kinect. One example is at the Ohio State University where researchers work on constraint-induced therapy, which has been shown to be a promising motor rehabilitation for Multiple Sclerosis. With Kinect they developed a gamified version of it as a viable in-home alternative for people with hand and arm weakness from Multiple Sclerosis.

Furthermore, a team of academic and health researchers in Spain published a paper describing their RemoviEM solution, a Kinect-system that uses virtual reality (VR) and natural user interfaces (NUI) to offer patients with MS an intuitive and motivating way to perform several motor rehabilitation exercises. The positive results encouraged them to improve the system further with new exercises.

FDA-Approved Medical Kinect-Solution
But there is more: The FDA has already approved a Kinect-solution from Jintronix for use in the treatment of patients who have suffered from a stroke. Researchers at the Bloorview Research Institute in Canada are currently working on games that make use of the Kinect to help children who have cerebral palsy to gain their motor function. Furthermore, Kinect is part of a revolutionary new way for patients with Parkinson’s disease to perform rehab exercises at home, and for physicians to remotely monitor how a patient’s medication works. This shows how evolving consumer technology can foster telemedicine at reasonable costs.

Using Kinect for Windows in the health and life science industries is proof that looking beyond the obvious and collaboration across disciplines is not only about successful business endeavors, it is about getting the right thing done faster.

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