Estimating Three-Dimensional Orientation of Human Body Parts by InertialMagnetic Sensing.docVIP

Sensors 2011, 11, 1489-1525; doi:10.3390/s110201489 OPEN ACCESS sensors ISSN 1424-8220 /journal/sensors Review Estimating Three-Dimensional Orientation of Human Body Parts by Inertial/Magnetic Sensing Angelo Maria Sabatini The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Piazza Martiri della Libertà 33, 56124 Pisa, Italy; E-Mail: sabatini@sssup.it; Tel.: +39-050-883-415; Fax: +39-050-883-101 Received: 15 December 2010; in revised form: 13 January 2011 / Accepted: 15 January 2011 / Published: 26 January 2011 Abstract: User-worn sensing units composed of inertial and magnetic sensors are becoming increasingly popular in various domains, including biomedical engineering, robotics, virtual reality, where they can also be applied for real-time tracking of the orientation of human body parts in the three-dimensional (3D) space. Although they are a promising choice as wearable sensors under many respects, the inertial and magnetic sensors currently in use offer measuring performance that are critical in order to achieve and maintain accurate 3D-orientation estimates, anytime and anywhere. This paper reviews the main sensor fusion and filtering techniques proposed for accurate inertial/magnetic orientation tracking of human body parts; it also gives useful recipes for their actual implementation. Keywords: human body motion tracking; inertial/magnetic sensing; strap-down inertial navigation; sensor fusion; Kalman filtering; quaternion 1. Introduction The problem of accurate tracking of the orientation (attitude) of rigid objects is important in several domains, among them navigation of man-made vehicles, e.g., air and spacecrafts, robotics and, of interest in this paper, ambulatory human movement analysis, which may include a range of interesting applications, from monitoring of activities of daily living (ADL) to virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR). Several technologies