In human motion science, accelerometers are used as linear distance sensors by attaching them to moving body parts, with their measurement axes its measurement axis aligned in the direction of motion. When double integrating the raw sensor data, multiple error sources are also integrated integrated as well, producing inaccuracies in the final position estimation which increases fast with the integration time. In this paper, we make a systematic and experimental comparison of different methods for position estimation, with different sensors and in different motion conditions. The objective is to correlate practical factors that appear in real applications, such as motion mean velocity, path length, calibration method, or accelerometer noise level, with the quality of the estimation. The results confirm that it is possible to use accelerometers to estimate short linear displacements of the body with a typical error of around 4.5% in the general conditions tested in this study. However, they also show that the motion kinematic conditions can be a key factor in the performance of this estimation, as the dynamic response of the accelerometer can affect the final results. The study lays out the basis for a better design of distance estimations, which are useful in a wide range of ambulatory human motion monitoring applications.
Keywords: accelerometers; distance estimation; measurement uncertainty; microelectromechanical inertial sensors.