Shoulder and Elbow Joint Angle Tracking With Inertial Sensors

Wearable inertial systems have recently been used to track human movement in and outside of the laboratory. Continuous monitoring of human movement can provide valuable information relevant to individuals' level of physical activity and functional ability. Traditionally, orientation has been calculated by integrating the angular velocity from gyroscopes. However, a small drift in the measured velocity leads to increasing integration error over time. To compensate that drift, complementary data from accelerometers are normally fused into tracking systems using the Kalman or extended Kalman filter. In this study, we combine kinematic models designed for control of robotic arms with state-space methods to continuously estimate the angles of human shoulder and elbow using two wearable inertial measurement units. We use the unscented Kalman filter to implement the nonlinear state-space inertial tracker. Shoulder and elbow joint angles obtained from 8 subjects using our inertial tracker were compared to the angles obtained from an optical-tracking reference system. On average, there was an RMS angle error of less than 8° for all shoulder and elbow angles. The average correlation coefficient for all movement tasks among all subjects was r ≥ 0.95 . This agreement between our inertial tracker and the optical reference system was obtained for both regular and fast-speed movement of the arm. The same method can be used to track movement of other joints.