What is Fall Detection

Microsoft Kinect is one of the most popular inexpensive gadgets released in recent years. Kinect is equipped with a color camera, a depth camera, and a microphone array. The device allows users to interact with a computer via a natural user interface in terms of gestures or voice commands. We believe that the research and development on using Kinect technology in healthcare will gain more momentum. The demand of Kinect-based applications is high, due to Kinect's low cost and portability, and its accurate and robust motion detection capability. In this chapter, we survey the current applications of using the Kinect technology in healthcare. Furthermore, we outline a number of open research issues that could overcome the limitations of the current Kinect technology.