Upper Body Pose Estimation Using Wearable Inertial Sensors and Multiplicative Kalman Filter

TL;DR

This paper introduces WePosE, a wearable inertial sensor system for upper body pose estimation that is cost-effective, portable, and robust to occlusion and magnetic disturbances, validated against optical tracking.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel wearable pose estimation system using IMUs and a multiplicative Kalman filter, addressing limitations of camera-based methods.

Findings

Effective pose estimation validated against optical tracking

Robust to occlusion and lighting conditions

Operates in magnetic disturbance environments

Abstract

Estimating the limbs pose in a wearable way may benefit multiple areas such as rehabilitation, teleoperation, human-robot interaction, gaming, and many more. Several solutions are commercially available, but they are usually expensive or not wearable/portable. We present a wearable pose estimation system (WePosE), based on inertial measurements units (IMUs), for motion analysis and body tracking. Differently from camera-based approaches, the proposed system does not suffer from occlusion problems and lighting conditions, it is cost effective and it can be used in indoor and outdoor environments. Moreover, since only accelerometers and gyroscopes are used to estimate the orientation, the system can be used also in the presence of iron and magnetic disturbances. An experimental validation using a high precision optical tracker has been performed. Results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach.