Body Tracking in Healthcare

Within the context of healthcare, there has been a long-standing interest in understanding the posture and movement of the human body. Gait analysis work over the years has looked to articulate the patterns and parameters of this movement both for a normal healthy body and in a range of movement-based disorders. In recent years, these efforts to understand the moving body have been transformed by significant advances in sensing technologies and computational analysis techniques all offering new ways for the moving body to be tracked, measured, and interpreted. While much of this work has been largely research focused, as the field matures, we are seeing more shifts into clinical practice. As a consequence, there is an increasing need to understand these sensing technologies over and above the specific capabilities to track, measure, and infer patterns of movement in themselves. Rather, there is an imperative to understand how the material form of these technologies enables them also to be situated in everyday healthcare contexts and practices. There are significant mutually interdependent ties between the fundamental characteristics and assumptions of these technologies and the configurations of everyday collaborative practices that are possible them. Our attention then must look to social, clinical, and technical relations pertaining to these various body technologies that may play out in particular ways across a range of different healthcare contexts and stakeholders. Our aim in this book is to explore these issues with key examples illustrating how social contexts of use relate to the properties and assumptions bound up in particular choices of body-tracking technology. We do this through a focus on three core application areas in healthcare--assessment, rehabilitation, and surgical interaction--and recent efforts to apply body-tracking technologies to them.
About the Author: Prof. Kenton O'Hara works in the Human Experience and Design Group at Microsoft Research and is a Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Bristol. His research explores everyday social and collaborative practices with technology with a view to informing design and innovation. His most recent research has focused on user experiences and practices with "touchless" gestural interaction technology with a particular emphasis on its application in surgery. Over the years, his research has investigated new technologies in a variety of domains including the home, mobile environments, urban settings, and the workplace. Kenton has authored over 100 publications and two books on public displays and music consumption. Prior to working for Microsoft Research, Kenton worked as a Senior Principal Scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia where he was Director of the HxI Initiative. He also worked as a Senior Researcher at Xerox EuroPARC, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, and the Appliance Studio. He has worked on numerous award-winning projects including the BBC's BAFTA and Royal Television Society award winning "Coast" location-based experience.