title: Ubiquitous human upper-limb motion estimation using wearable sensors.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computing, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ UK. z.zhang@imperial.ac.uk
authors.forename: Zhi-Qiang
authors.initials: ZQ
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Wai-Choong
authors.initials: WC
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Jian-Kang
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D000054:Acceleration; D000465:Algorithms; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena / Q000502:physiology*; D003020:Clothing; D004551:Elbow Joint / Q000502:physiology; D004574:Electromagnetic Fields; D057918:Fiducial Markers; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D009068:Movement; D012785:Shoulder Joint / Q000502:physiology; D034941:Upper Extremity / Q000502:physiology*