Ubiquitous human upper-limb motion estimation using wearable sensors

IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed. 2011 Jul;15(4):513-21. doi: 10.1109/TITB.2011.2159122. Epub 2011 Jun 9.

Abstract

Human motion capture technologies have been widely used in a wide spectrum of applications, including interactive game and learning, animation, film special effects, health care, navigation, and so on. The existing human motion capture techniques, which use structured multiple high-resolution cameras in a dedicated studio, are complicated and expensive. With the rapid development of microsensors-on-chip, human motion capture using wearable microsensors has become an active research topic. Because of the agility in movement, upper-limb motion estimation has been regarded as the most difficult problem in human motion capture. In this paper, we take the upper limb as our research subject and propose a novel ubiquitous upper-limb motion estimation algorithm, which concentrates on modeling the relationship between upper-arm movement and forearm movement. A link structure with 5 degrees of freedom (DOF) is proposed to model the human upper-limb skeleton structure. Parameters are defined according to Denavit-Hartenberg convention, forward kinematics equations are derived, and an unscented Kalman filter is deployed to estimate the defined parameters. The experimental results have shown that the proposed upper-limb motion capture and analysis algorithm outperforms other fusion methods and provides accurate results in comparison to the BTS optical motion tracker.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acceleration
  • Algorithms
  • Biomechanical Phenomena / physiology*
  • Clothing*
  • Elbow Joint / physiology
  • Electromagnetic Fields
  • Fiducial Markers*
  • Humans
  • Models, Biological*
  • Movement
  • Shoulder Joint / physiology
  • Upper Extremity / physiology*