A Smartphone-Based Acquisition System for Hips Rotation Fluency Assessment

TL;DR

This paper presents a smartphone-based system that uses gyroscopic data and a mobile app to assess hips' movement fluency by estimating the kinematic jerk during complex motor tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, accessible method for measuring movement fluency using smartphones and wireless data transmission for real-time or offline analysis.

Findings

Successful estimation of hips' kinematic jerk using smartphone sensors

Real-time data transmission and processing capability

Potential for accessible movement assessment tools

Abstract

The present contribution is motivated by recent studies on the assessment of the fluency of body movements during complex motor tasks. In particular, we focus on the estimation of the Cartesian kinematic jerk (namely, the derivative of the acceleration) of the hips' orientation during a full three-dimensional movement. The kinematic jerk index is estimated on the basis of gyroscopic signals acquired through a smartphone. A specific free mobile application available for the Android mobile operating system, HyperIMU, is used to acquire the gyroscopic signals and to transmit them to a personal computer via a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) through a wireless network. The personal computer elaborates the acquired data through a MATLAB script, either in real time or offline, and returns the kinematic jerk index associated to a motor task.