Artanim XRay

Besides its use in the entertainment industry, motion capture has proven itself to be an invaluable tool in other domains such as sports science, robotics and ergonomics, as well as for various healthcare applications.  

Particularly in healthcare scenarios however, one significant hurdle remains; equipping a patient with markers is slow and cumbersome. As such, even when a marker-based motion capture system is available, physicians for example often prefer to rely on a goniometer for manual joint angle measurements.  

This is a typical scenario where real-time markerless motion capture would be of great benefit. Tracking a patient requires nothing more than a literal click of a button, and in most cases can simply happen in the outfit they showed up in.  

But what if besides showing the physician live data on a monitor, we could also bring the tracked data to life in the examination room?  

In this project we’re developing Artanim XRay, an Augmented Reality (AR) application that serves as a testbed to evaluate how real-time markerless motion capture data can be made more insightful in healthcare contexts. Similar in spirit to our earlier HoloMed project, but benefitting from a decade of technological advancement, Artanim XRay combines the “passthrough” functionality of modern XR headsets with the real-time markerless motion capture of one or more subjects and overlays the tracked skeleton on top of the live AR view of the subject.  

The application allows for the spatial selection of relevant joints – for example those for which a patient could be undergoing physical rehabilitation – and offers a set of tools to visualize relevant parameters such as joint angles and joint paths over time in real-time.  

We’re looking to expand the toolset throughout the project and aim to establish how this combination of technologies can be beneficial for healthcare, with an eye on education, evaluation and rehabilitation.