Using the Kinect to detect potentially harmful hand postures in pianists

Pianists who practice hours per day may have a risk for developing playing-related musculoskeletal injuries if they do not play with proper hand alignment. In order to detect the harmful, misaligned hand postures (such as wrist flexion and extension, knuckle collapse, and ulnar and radial deviation) and analyze the injury risk, a motion capture system was developed using the Microsoft Kinect depth camera. Data were captured on professional pianists and student pianists from the School of Music, University of Missouri. Features extracted from the 3D point clouds reconstructed from the Kinect depth images are used for hand posture evaluation. Results are included for different hand postures of participating pianists.