Wearable sensory apparatus performance while using inertial measurement units

Abstract

With the objective of satisfying the technical and functional requirements set for intention detection (ID) algorithm, we investigated suitable strategies to reduce the number of remote units such as inertial measurement units (IMU). The optimization should not affect the ID algorithm, which needs to detect continuous transitions between different locomotion modes such as ground-level walking, walking up and down slopes, climbing/descending stairs, standing up, sitting down, turning and other scenarios of real life. In the developed solution, the number of remote units was reduced from 9 to 4. In order to achieve the same level of ID algorithm performance, the WSA units need to perform almost perfectly. The main innovation is nearly perfect data transfer from remote units to the master unit. This way a package loss below 0.05% of transferred packages is achieved.