A wearable real-time kinetic measurement sensor setup for human locomotion

Abstract

Current laboratory-based setups (optical marker cameras + force plates) for human motion measurement require participants to stay in a constrained capture region which forbids rich movement types. This study established a fully wearable system, based on commercially available sensors (inertial measurement units + pressure insoles), that can measure both kinematic and kinetic motion data simultaneously and support wireless frame-by-frame streaming. In addition, its capability and accuracy were tested against a conventional laboratory-based setup. An experiment was conducted, with 9 participants wearing the wearable measurement system and performing 13 daily motion activities, from slow walking to fast running, together with vertical jump, squat, lunge, and single-leg landing, inside the capture space of the laboratory-based motion capture system. The recorded sensor data were post-processed to obtain joint angles, ground reaction forces (GRFs), and joint torques (via multi-body inverse dynamics). Compared to the laboratory-based system, the established wearable measurement system can measure accurate information of all lower limb joint angles (Pearson’s r = 0.929), vertical GRFs (Pearson’s r = 0.954), and ankle joint torques (Pearson’s r = 0.917). Center of pressure (CoP) in the anterior–posterior direction and knee joint torques were fairly matched (Pearson’s r = 0.683 and 0.612, respectively). Calculated hip joint torques and measured medial–lateral CoP did not match with the laboratory-based system (Pearson’s r = 0.21 and 0.47, respectively). Furthermore, both raw and processed datasets are openly accessible (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6457662). Documentation, data processing codes, and guidelines to establish the real-time wearable kinetic measurement system are also shared (https://github.com/HuaweiWang/WearableMeasurementSystem).

Estimating 3D kinematics and kinetics from virtual inertial sensor data through musculoskeletal movement simulations

“…In addition to the kinematics, kinetics, specifically joint moments, ground reaction forces (GRFs), and muscle forces, give valuable information about the underlying mechanisms in the body. After motion reconstruction, the kinetics can be estimated with inverse dynamics ( Karatsidis et al, 2019 ) using estimated GRFs ( Skals et al, 2017 ) or using pressure insoles ( Wang et al, 2023 ). However, this approach has the disadvantage that multiple processing steps are required, while it also results in inconsistencies between kinematics and kinetics.…”

Toward a Wearable Gait Lab for Quantitative Assessment of Musculoskeletal Function

“…Ground reaction forces (GRFs) data were collected via a split-belt instrumented treadmill (Motek-Forcelink B.V, Culemborg, The Netherlands). A more detailed set-up and experimental procedure can be found in [234].…”