LiftingDoneRight: A Privacy-Aware Human Motion Tracking System for Healthcare Professionals

Abstract

This article describes the design and implementation of LiftingDoneRight, a novel system for healthcare professionals to enhance their compliance with best practices and regulations regarding proper body mechanics for lifting and pulling activities. The system uses Microsoft Kinect to track the motion of consented users non-intrusively. The system relies on the use of a smartwatch to deliver an alert via vibration and text display whenever a wrong activity that violated the proper body mechanics has been detected. A core contribution of this study is a registration mechanism for a healthcare professional to explicitly give permission to the system to monitor his or her activities. Furthermore, a non-intrusive biometrics-based single sign-on mechanism is incorporated into the system to allow a user to be automatically identified for tracking as long as the user has manually registered with the system before. Finally, the system offers a number of configurations to accommodate different usability needs and privacy requirements.