Abstract. Nowadays, modern computational technologies used in rehabilitation processes have grown considerably in health care centers. These open a broad of new paradigms which improve the rehabilitation process, robotic hardware, virtual reality system and others. Particularly, Virtual Reality systems are notable for having a high interaction with the user based on real-time responsive actions. In rehabilitation, these systems are offered as modern strategies where a patient performs a set of therapy activities recognized as integration tasks through games or simulations. Several health care centers are using these strategies as part of the regular therapy due to the treatment time is less than using the standard ones. If a therapy is focused on upper limbs, a set of specialized gestures are necessary for the total recovery of patients. In this paper we present an effective solution dedicated to capture and recognition of movement of the upper limbs based on gross motor skills. Our proposal integrates corporal gross gestures used as the main user interface in an entire platform for physical rehabilitation of children with motor disabilities in upper limbs. It is designed based on a Microsoft Kinect as a low-cost hardware to capture the motion. Several gestures are achieved to test our proposal given excellent results. Key words: physical rehabilitation, gesture recognition, virtual reality, motion capture 1

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