Multi-modal Upper Limbs Human Motion Estimation From a Reduced Set of Affordable Sensors

This study aims at developing a new affordable motion capture system for human upper limbs' joint kinematics estimation based on a reduced set of visual inertial measurement units coupled with a markerless skeleton tracking algorithm. The markerless skeleton tracking algorithm allows to alleviate the kinematic redundancy that is observed if only a single visual inertial measurement unit is used at the hand level but it introduces undesired outliers. A Sliding Window Inverse Kinematics Algoritm based on a biomechanical model is proposed to filter out outliers. It has the advantage to constrain the evolution of joint kinematics while being able to handle multi-modalities. The proposed system was validated with five healthy volunteers performing a popular rehabilitation pick and place task. Joint angles estimated using our method were compared with the ones obtained using a reference stereophotogrammetric system. The results showed an average root mean square error of 9.7deg along with an average correlation of 0.8. These results compare favorably with literature results obtained with more numerous and relatively costly sensors or more elaborated and expensive markerless systems.