Sybar, a human motion analysis system for rehabilition medicine

The Sybar project is a designer's Ph.D project that deals with the development of a motion-analysis system for rehabilitation medicine, at the VU Hospital in Amsterdam. Human motion can be analyzed by biomechanical measurement systems. There are a number of different methods to generate several types of data on human motion. Biomechanical analysis of patients with motion disorders can potentially give valuable information to physicians. However, existing biomechanical measurement systems that have been introduced in a clinical setting have had only limited success, because they have been designed for other purposes. The goal of the Sybar project is to build a biomechanical analysis system specific for the clinical setting. We take the clinically accepted way of human observation as a starting point. Instead of providing large amounts of measurement data separately, the existing image of the patient is enhanced with additional information. We believe that by showing a video of a patient in combination with graphics measurement results, it becomes much easier to directly relate the data to the actions of the subject under investigation. Sybar is developed using object oriented methods. In particular, the Object Modeling Technique (OMT) is used. From a softwareengineering point of view, interesting aspects are: • a clear system specification can not be determined without some form of rapid prototyping. • the environment of the system is complex, and dynamic. • the requirements for digital video and image processing are on the edge of what is technically feasible.