This paper presents an innovative solution based on Time-Of-Flight (TOF) video technology to motion patterns detection for real-time dynamic hand gesture recognition. The resulting system is able to detect motion-based hand gestures getting as input depth images. The recognizable motion patterns are modeled on the basis of the human arm anatomy and its degrees of freedom, generating a collection of synthetic motion patterns that is compared with the captured input patterns in order to finally classify the input gesture. For the evaluation of our system a significant collection of gestures has been compiled, getting results for 3D pattern classification as well as a comparison with the results using only 2D information.