Data-Driven Inversion Method for Human Body Electrostatic Potential from Noncontact Measurements

Human body static electricity is one of the major hazards in electrostatic-sensitive industrial environments. Existing noncontact measurement methods often rely on explicit physical modeling and generally require accurate prior knowledge of the sensor layout, target motion state, and scene geometry, which limits their applicability in complex dynamic scenarios. To address this issue, this paper proposes a neural network-based data-driven method for estimating human body electrostatic potential from noncontact electrostatic measurements. The proposed method uses four-channel noncontact electrostatic sensor signals as inputs and the synchronously measured reference body potential as the target output. Sixteen neural network architectures, including recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, attention-based networks, and hybrid models, are systematically evaluated. The Gray Wolf Optimizer is further used to optimize key hyperparameters of each model. A 5 m × 5 m experimental scene is established, and 36 groups of synchronized time-series signals are collected from three subjects under two motion states. Training and validation datasets are constructed using a sliding time-window method, and the effects of model architecture, window length, and subject–motion condition on inversion performance are analyzed. The results show that the proposed method can effectively estimate human body electrostatic potential from noncontact measurements. Among the evaluated models, Trans-LSTM achieves the best performance. With a window length of 1 s, it obtains a validation normalized root-mean-square error of approximately 0.139 and a coefficient of determination of approximately 0.72. Compared with a representative existing method under the same coverage area and sensor layout, the proposed approach reduces the NRMSE from 0.22 to 0.139. These results demonstrate that the proposed method provides a feasible approach for remote, real-time, and noncontact monitoring of human body electrostatic potential in complex environments.