Cardiac Rehabilitation Video Game

Patients are afraid to do cardiac rehabilitation after a heart attack because of fear of over-stressing their bodies. Unfortunately the lack of cardiac rehabilitation can result in repeat heart attacks. This project aims to build a video game with the Microsoft Kinect that allows patients to exercise within safe limits because their heart rate and blood oxygenation are constantly tracked using a Bluetooth pulse oximeter.

This project will involve:

1. Creating a simple prototype video game using the UNITY game development engine that uses the Microsoft Kinect to move an on-screen avatar.
2. Creating algorithms using computer vision libraries to detect the performance of cardiac rehabilitation exercises and display the number of repetitions of the exercises performed.
3. Integrating the data from a Bluetooth pulse oximeter into the game and displaying it in parallel with the movement of the on-screen avatar and number of repetitions of exercises performed.
4. Uploading the cardiac rehabilitation performance data to a patient’s Indivo X personal health record by creating a C# client library for Indivo X (RESTful protocol for which other client libraries already exist and a C# client library has already been started).

Experience with UNITY game development, hacking with the Kinect, Bluetooth programming in C#, and RESTful programming with C# are all desirable skills.

See a video of progress that was made on this project last year http://newmed.media.mit.edu/blog/jom/2011/03/17/esoma-exercise-system-ca...