Signal processing algorithms for position measurement with MEMS-based accelerometer

Abstract

This paper presents signal processing algorithms for position measurements with MEMS-accelerometers in a motion analysis system. The motion analysis system is intended to analyze the human motion with MEMS-based-sensors which is a part of embedded sensor systems for health. MEMS-accelerometers can be used to measure acceleration and theoretically the velocity and position can be derived from the integration of acceleration. However, there normally is drift in the measured acceleration, which is enlarged under integration. In this paper, the signal processing algorithms are used to minimize the drift during integration by MEMS-based accel-erometer. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms improved the results a lot. The algorithm reduced the drift in one minute by about 20 meters in the simulation. It can be seen as a reference of signal processing for the motion analysis system with MEMS-based accelerometer in the future work.