The importance of estimating human movement has increased in the field of human motion capture. HTC VIVE is a popular device that provides a convenient way of capturing human motions using several sensors. Recently, the motion of only users' hands has been captured, thereby greatly reducing the range of motion captured. This paper proposes a framework to estimate single-arm orientations using soft sensors mainly by combining a Bi-long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) and two-layer LSTM. Positions of the two hands are measured using an HTC VIVE set, and the orientations of a single arm, including its corresponding upper arm and forearm, are estimated using the proposed framework based on the estimated positions of the two hands. Given that the proposed framework is meant for a single arm, if orientations of two arms are required to be estimated, the estimations are performed twice. To obtain the ground truth of the orientations of single-arm movements, two Myo gesture-control sensory armbands are employed on the single arm: one for the upper arm and the other for the forearm. The proposed framework analyzed the contextual features of consecutive sensory arm movements, which provides an efficient way to improve the accuracy of arm movement estimation. In comparison with the ground truth, the proposed method estimated the arm movements using a dynamic time warping distance, which was the average of 73.90% less than that of a conventional Bayesian framework. The distinct feature of our proposed framework is that the number of sensors attached to end-users is reduced. Additionally, with the use of our framework, the arm orientations can be estimated with any soft sensor, and good accuracy of the estimations can be ensured. Another contribution is the suggestion of the combination of the Bi-LSTM and two-layer LSTM.
Keywords: HTC VIVE; Myo armband; human motion capture; movement estimation; soft sensor.