scholarly journals Wearable Sensor Clothing for Body Movement Measurement during Physical Activities in Healthcare

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 2068
Author(s):  
Armands Ancans ◽  
Modris Greitans ◽  
Ricards Cacurs ◽  
Beate Banga ◽  
Artis Rozentals

This paper presents a wearable wireless system for measuring human body activities, consisting of small inertial sensor nodes and the main hub for data transmission via Bluetooth for further analysis. Unlike optical and ultrasonic technologies, the proposed solution has no movement restrictions, such as the requirement to stay in the line of sight, and it provides information on the dynamics of the human body’s poses regardless of its location. The problem of the correct placement of sensors on the body is considered, a simplified architecture of the wearable clothing is described, an experimental set-up is developed and tests are performed. The system has been tested by performing several physical exercises and comparing the performance with the commercially available BTS Bioengineering SMART DX motion capture system. The results show that our solution is more suitable for complex exercises as the system based on digital cameras tends to lose some markers. The proposed wearable sensor clothing can be used as a multi-purpose data acquisition device for application-specific data analysis, thus providing an automated tool for scientists and doctors to measure patient’s body movements.

2019 ◽  
Vol 252 ◽  
pp. 02010
Author(s):  
Tomasz Szymczyk ◽  
Stanisław Skulimowski

Virtual reality technologies known since the 1990s have virtually disappeared. They have been replaced by their new editions characterised by a very faithful reproduction of details. The laboratory described in the article was created to study the intensity of various sensations experienced by a person in virtual worlds. A number of different scenarios have been developed that are designed to trigger specific reactions, to produce symptoms similar to those observed in arachnophobia, acrophobia or claustrophobia. The person examined can be equipped with a series of non-invasive sensors placed on the body in such a way that they do not interfere with immersion in VR. The laboratory instruments enable the acquisition and synchronisation of many signals. Body movement data is recorded by means of Kinect. Involuntary hand movements are measured with 5DT gloves. In addition, body temperature, ambient temperature and skin moisture are continuously monitored. Apart from recording the image from VR goggles, it is also possible to record the entire session on camera in 4K resolution in order to interpret facial expressions. The results are then analysed in detail and checked for patterns. The article describes both the test set-up itself as well as several test scenarios and presents the results of pilot studies.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 914 ◽  
Author(s):  
Long Liu ◽  
Hui-Hui Wang ◽  
Sen Qiu ◽  
Yun-Cui Zhang ◽  
Zheng-Dong Hao

Proper stroke posture and rhythm are crucial for kayakers to achieve perfect performance and avoid the occurrence of sport injuries. The traditional video-based analysis method has numerous limitations (e.g., site and occlusion). In this study, we propose a systematic approach for evaluating the training performance of kayakers based on the multiple sensors fusion technology. Kayakers’ motion information is collected by miniature inertial sensor nodes attached on the body. The extend Kalman filter (EKF) method is used for data fusion and updating human posture. After sensor calibration, the kayakers’ actions are reconstructed by rigid-body model. The quantitative kinematic analysis is carried out based on joint angles. Machine learning algorithms are used for differentiating the stroke cycle into different phases, including entry, pull, exit and recovery. The experiment shows that our method can provide comprehensive motion evaluation information under real on-water scenario, and the phase identification of kayaker’s motions is up to 98% validated by videography method. The proposed approach can provide quantitative information for coaches and athletes, which can be used to improve the training effects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (17) ◽  
pp. 2-1-2-6
Author(s):  
Shih-Wei Sun ◽  
Ting-Chen Mou ◽  
Pao-Chi Chang

To improve the workout efficiency and to provide the body movement suggestions to users in a “smart gym” environment, we propose to use a depth camera for capturing a user’s body parts and mount multiple inertial sensors on the body parts of a user to generate deadlift behavior models generated by a recurrent neural network structure. The contribution of this paper is trifold: 1) The multimodal sensing signals obtained from multiple devices are fused for generating the deadlift behavior classifiers, 2) the recurrent neural network structure can analyze the information from the synchronized skeletal and inertial sensing data, and 3) a Vaplab dataset is generated for evaluating the deadlift behaviors recognizing capability in the proposed method.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3771
Author(s):  
Alexey Kashevnik ◽  
Walaa Othman ◽  
Igor Ryabchikov ◽  
Nikolay Shilov

Meditation practice is mental health training. It helps people to reduce stress and suppress negative thoughts. In this paper, we propose a camera-based meditation evaluation system, that helps meditators to improve their performance. We rely on two main criteria to measure the focus: the breathing characteristics (respiratory rate, breathing rhythmicity and stability), and the body movement. We introduce a contactless sensor to measure the respiratory rate based on a smartphone camera by detecting the chest keypoint at each frame, using an optical flow based algorithm to calculate the displacement between frames, filtering and de-noising the chest movement signal, and calculating the number of real peaks in this signal. We also present an approach to detecting the movement of different body parts (head, thorax, shoulders, elbows, wrists, stomach and knees). We have collected a non-annotated dataset for meditation practice videos consists of ninety videos and the annotated dataset consists of eight videos. The non-annotated dataset was categorized into beginner and professional meditators and was used for the development of the algorithm and for tuning the parameters. The annotated dataset was used for evaluation and showed that human activity during meditation practice could be correctly estimated by the presented approach and that the mean absolute error for the respiratory rate is around 1.75 BPM, which can be considered tolerable for the meditation application.


2004 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 1524-1535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grégoire Courtine ◽  
Marco Schieppati

We tested the hypothesis that common principles govern the production of the locomotor patterns for both straight-ahead and curved walking. Whole body movement recordings showed that continuous curved walking implies substantial, limb-specific changes in numerous gait descriptors. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to uncover the spatiotemporal structure of coordination among lower limb segments. PCA revealed that the same kinematic law accounted for the coordination among lower limb segments during both straight-ahead and curved walking, in both the frontal and sagittal planes: turn-related changes in the complex behavior of the inner and outer limbs were captured in limb-specific adaptive tuning of coordination patterns. PCA was also performed on a data set including all elevation angles of limb segments and trunk, thus encompassing 13 degrees of freedom. The results showed that both straight-ahead and curved walking were low dimensional, given that 3 principal components accounted for more than 90% of data variance. Furthermore, the time course of the principal components was unchanged by curved walking, thereby indicating invariant coordination patterns among all body segments during straight-ahead and curved walking. Nevertheless, limb- and turn-dependent tuning of the coordination patterns encoded the adaptations of the limb kinematics to the actual direction of the walking body. Absence of vision had no significant effect on the intersegmental coordination during either straight-ahead or curved walking. Our findings indicate that kinematic laws, probably emerging from the interaction of spinal neural networks and mechanical oscillators, subserve the production of both straight-ahead and curved walking. During locomotion, the descending command tunes basic spinal networks so as to produce the changes in amplitude and phase relationships of the spinal output, sufficient to achieve the body turn.


1963 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD BAINBRIDGE

1. Observations made on bream, goldfish and dace swimming in the ‘Fish Wheel’ apparatus are described. These include: 2. An account of the complex changes in curvature of the caudal fin during different phases of the normal locomotory cycle. Measurements of this curvature and of the angles of attack associated with it are given. 3. An account of changes in area of the caudal fin during the cycle of lateral oscillation. Detailed measurements of these changes, which may involve a 30 % increase in height or a 20 % increase in area, are given. 4. An account of the varying speed of transverse movement of the caudal fin under various conditions and the relationship of this to the changes in area and amount of bending. Details of the way this transverse speed may be asymmetrically distributed relative to the axis of progression of the fish are given. 5. An account of the extent of the lateral propulsive movements in other parts of the body. These are markedly different in the different species studied. Measurements of the wave length of this movement and of the rate of progression of the wave down the body are given. 6. It is concluded that the fish has active control over the speed, the amount of bending and the area of the caudal fin during transverse movement. 7. The bending of the fin and its changes in area are considered to be directed to the end of smoothing out and making more uniform what would otherwise be an intermittent thrust from the oscillating tail region. 8. Some assessment is made of the proportion of the total thrust contributed by the caudal fin. This is found to vary considerably, according to the form of the lateral propulsive movements of the whole body, from a value of 45% for the bream to 84% for the dace.


1960 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 759-763 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Snellen

When studying a walking subject's thermal exchange with the environment, it is essential to know whether in level walking any part of the total energy expenditure is converted into external mechanical work and whether in grade walking the amount of the external work is predictable from physical laws. For this purpose an experiment was set up in which a subject walked on a motor-driven treadmill in a climatic room. In each series of measurements a subject walked uphill for 3 hours and on the level for another hour. Metabolism was kept equal in both situations. Air and wall temperatures were adjusted to the observed weighted skin temperature in order to avoid any heat exchange by radiation and convection. Heat loss by evaporation was derived from the weight loss of the subject. All measurements were carried out in a state of thermal equilibrium. In grade walking there was a difference between heat production and heat loss by evaporation. This difference equaled the caloric equivalent of the product of body weight and gained height. In level walking the heat production equaled heat loss. Hence it was concluded that in level walking all the energy is converted into heat inside the body. Submitted on April 26, 1960


The use of the blast-wave analogy, as an aid to the interpretation of experimental data on the motion of a fluid past an obstacle at hypersonic speeds, has led to the theoretical study of its role in an asymptotic expansion of the solution to the governing equations at large distances downstream of the body. In all attempts to set up such an expansion it has proved necessary to divide the flow régime into two parts, an outer part dominated by the blast wave and an inner part consisting of streamlines which, originally, pass close by the body. The matching of these two regions is apparently only possible if a certain integral vanishes. In the present paper a numerical integration, in one particular set of circumstances, is carried out to test the validity of the asymptotic expansion proposed. Formally, an unsteady problem is tackled, for ease of computation, but the steady analogue follows immediately and is of exactly the form discussed in the earlier investigations. It is found that the main results are in line with the theory and that the integral in question is indistinguishable from zero. However, a deeper investigation of the asymptotic expansion shows that, for an expansion of the type envisaged, an infinite set of integrals must each vanish. The next integral does not appear to be zero according to our computations but this result is not believed to be conclusive. Assuming that all the integrals do vanish, then it appears that the inner layer, which although inviscid, has many of the characteristics of a viscous boundary layer, has the addi­tional, surprising property that it can exert no direct influence on the outer flow at large distances downstream of the body.


2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Sloterdijk

The articles in this first installment of a series on choreography that considers the relationship between philosophy and dance interrogate conceptions of the body, movement, and language. Translated for the first time into English, the selection by José Gil reads the dancing body as paradoxical through the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; and the chapter by Peter Sloterdijk examines modernity's impulse toward movement and posits a critical theory of mobilization. An interview with choreographer Hooman Sharifi accompanies a meditation on his recent performance.


2013 ◽  
Vol 594-595 ◽  
pp. 503-510
Author(s):  
T.I.T. Noor Hasanah ◽  
D.C. Wijeyesekera ◽  
Ismail bin Bakar ◽  
Wahab Saidin

Applications of lightweight construction materials enable the design and construction in challenging, difficult and demanding scenarios. Construction materials with enhanced stiffness as in sandwich panels, large portable structures and floating foundations are examples of such materials. The advent of cellular structure technology has actively introduced innovation and enabled design and construction, meeting engineering requirements such as in the construction of the body of air crafts. Cellular mat structures present in the minimum, triple benefits in being lightweight, load sharing and minimising non-uniform deformation. This paper further explores the use of recycled plastic waste as the base material for an innovative geomaterial. The combination of cellular structure, mat structure and use of recycled waste material is a desirable development in manufacturing. Paper also outlines the techno social benefit of adopting such material in construction. Other application-specific benefits related to cellular mats are those like noise reduction, energy absorption, thermal insulation, mechanical damping. This paper specifically presents the development of a new multifunctional lightweight material is been proposed as an invective innovation for highway construction on challenging ground condition.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document