scholarly journals Centre of Pressure Estimation during Walking Using Only Inertial-Measurement Units and End-To-End Statistical Modelling

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (21) ◽  
pp. 6136
Author(s):  
Janez Podobnik ◽  
David Kraljić ◽  
Matjaž Zadravec ◽  
Marko Munih

Estimation of the centre of pressure (COP) is an important part of the gait analysis, for example, when evaluating the functional capacity of individuals affected by motor impairment. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) and force sensors are commonly used to measure gait characteristic of healthy and impaired subjects. We present a methodology for estimating the COP solely from raw gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer data from IMUs using statistical modelling. We demonstrate the viability of the method using an example of two models: a linear model and a non-linear Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network model. Models were trained on the COP ground truth data measured using an instrumented treadmill and achieved the average intra-subject root mean square (RMS) error between estimated and ground truth COP of 12.3 mm and the average inter-subject RMS error of 23.7 mm which is comparable or better than similar studies so far. We show that the calibration procedure in the instrumented treadmill can be as short as a couple of minutes without the decrease in our model performance. We also show that the magnetic component of the recorded IMU signal, which is most sensitive to environmental changes, can be safely dropped without a significant decrease in model performance. Finally, we show that the number of IMUs can be reduced to five without deterioration in the model performance.

Author(s):  
Kevin Carey ◽  
Benjamin Abruzzo ◽  
David P. Harvie ◽  
Christopher Korpela

Abstract This paper aims to aid robot and autonomous vehicle designers by providing a comparison between four different inertial measurement units (IMUs) which could be used to aid in vehicle navigation in a GPS-denied or inertial-only scenario. A differential-drive ground vehicle was designed to carry the multiple different IMUs, mounted coaxially, to enable direct comparison of performance in a planar environment. The experiments focused on the growth of pose error of the ground vehicle originating from the odometry senors and the IMUs. An extended Kalman Filter was developed to fuse the odometry and inertial measurements for this comparison. The four specific IMUs evaluated were: CNS 5000, Xsens 300, Microstrain GX5-35, and Phidgets 1044 and the ground truth for experiments was provided by an Optitrack motion capture system (MCS). Finally, metrics for choosing IMUs, merging cost and performance considerations, are proposed and discussed. While the CNS 5000 has the best objective error specifications, based on these metrics the Xsens 300 exhibits the best absolute performance while the Phidgets 1044 provides the best performance-per-dollar.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Simone A. Ludwig

Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) were first applied to aircraft navigation and large devices in the 1930s. At that time their application was restricted because of constraints such as size, cost, and power consumption. In recent years, however, Micro-electromechanical (MEMS) IMUs were introduced with very favorable features such as low cost, compactness, and low processing power. One of the disadvantages of these low cost IMU sensors is that the accuracy is lower compared to high-end sensors. However, past experimental results have shown that redundant Magnetic and Inertial Measurement Units (MIMUs) improve navigation performance such as for unmanned air vehicles. Even though past simulation and experimental results demonstrated that redundant sensors improve the navigation performance, however, none of the current research work offers information as to how many sensors are required in order to meet a certain accuracy. This paper evaluates different numbers of sensor configurations of an MIMU sensor array using a simulation environment. Differently rotated MIMU sensors are incrementally added and the Madgwick filter is used to estimate the Euler angles of foot mounted MIMU data. The evaluation measure used is the root mean square error (RMSE) based on the Euler angles as compared to the ground truth. During the experiments it was noticed that the execution time with increasing number of sensors increases exponentially, and thus, the parallelization of the code was designed and implemented, and run on a multi-core machine. Thus, the speedup of the parallel implementation was evaluated. The findings using the parallel version with 16 sensors are that the execution time is less than twice the execution time of having only 1 sensor and 24 times less than using the sequential version with the added benefit of a 26% increase in accuracy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kuschan ◽  
Henning Schmidt ◽  
Jörg Krüger

Abstract:This paper presents an analysis of two distinct human lifting movements regarding acceleration and angular velocity. For the first movement, the ergonomic one, the test persons produced the lifting power by squatting down, bending at the hips and knees only. Whereas performing the unergonomic one they bent forward lifting the box mainly with their backs. The measurements were taken by using a vest equipped with five Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) with 9 Dimensions of Freedom (DOF) each. In the following the IMU data captured for these two movements will be evaluated using statistics and visualized. It will also be discussed with respect to their suitability as features for further machine learning classifications. The reason for observing these movements is that occupational diseases of the musculoskeletal system lead to a reduction of the workers’ quality of life and extra costs for companies. Therefore, a vest, called CareJack, was designed to give the worker a real-time feedback about his ergonomic state while working. The CareJack is an approach to reduce the risk of spinal and back diseases. This paper will also present the idea behind it as well as its main components.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Thomas Rietveld ◽  
Barry S. Mason ◽  
Victoria L. Goosey-Tolfrey ◽  
Lucas H. V. van der Woude ◽  
Sonja de Groot ◽  
...  

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (12) ◽  
pp. 4050
Author(s):  
Dejan Pavlovic ◽  
Christopher Davison ◽  
Andrew Hamilton ◽  
Oskar Marko ◽  
Robert Atkinson ◽  
...  

Monitoring cattle behaviour is core to the early detection of health and welfare issues and to optimise the fertility of large herds. Accelerometer-based sensor systems that provide activity profiles are now used extensively on commercial farms and have evolved to identify behaviours such as the time spent ruminating and eating at an individual animal level. Acquiring this information at scale is central to informing on-farm management decisions. The paper presents the development of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that classifies cattle behavioural states (`rumination’, `eating’ and `other’) using data generated from neck-mounted accelerometer collars. During three farm trials in the United Kingdom (Easter Howgate Farm, Edinburgh, UK), 18 steers were monitored to provide raw acceleration measurements, with ground truth data provided by muzzle-mounted pressure sensor halters. A range of neural network architectures are explored and rigorous hyper-parameter searches are performed to optimise the network. The computational complexity and memory footprint of CNN models are not readily compatible with deployment on low-power processors which are both memory and energy constrained. Thus, progressive reductions of the CNN were executed with minimal loss of performance in order to address the practical implementation challenges, defining the trade-off between model performance versus computation complexity and memory footprint to permit deployment on micro-controller architectures. The proposed methodology achieves a compression of 14.30 compared to the unpruned architecture but is nevertheless able to accurately classify cattle behaviours with an overall F1 score of 0.82 for both FP32 and FP16 precision while achieving a reasonable battery lifetime in excess of 5.7 years.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-240
Author(s):  
Simon Beck ◽  
Bernhard Laufer ◽  
Sabine Krueger-Ziolek ◽  
Knut Moeller

AbstractDemographic changes and increasing air pollution entail that monitoring of respiratory parameters is in the focus of research. In this study, two customary inertial measurement units (IMUs) are used to measure the breathing rate by using quaternions. One IMU was located ventral, and one was located dorsal on the thorax with a belt. The relative angle between the quaternion of each IMU was calculated and compared to the respiratory frequency obtained by a spirometer, which was used as a reference. A frequency analysis of both signals showed that the obtained respiratory rates vary slightly (less than 0.2/min) between the two systems. The introduced belt can analyse the respiratory rate and can be used for surveillance tasks in clinical settings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigi D’Alfonso ◽  
Emanuele Garone ◽  
Pietro Muraca ◽  
Paolo Pugliese

AbstractIn this work, we face the problem of estimating the relative position and orientation of a camera and an object, when they are both equipped with inertial measurement units (IMUs), and the object exhibits a set of n landmark points with known coordinates (the so-called Pose estimation or PnP Problem). We present two algorithms that, fusing the information provided by the camera and the IMUs, solve the PnP problem with good accuracy. These algorithms only use the measurements given by IMUs’ inclinometers, as the magnetometers usually give inaccurate estimates of the Earth magnetic vector. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is assessed by numerical simulations and experimental tests. The results of the tests are compared with the most recent methods proposed in the literature.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document