Using Wearable Sensors to Estimate Vertical Ground Reaction Force Based on a Transformer

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new method to estimate ground reaction forces (GRF) from wearable sensors for a variety of real-world situations. We address the drawbacks of using force plates with limited activity range and high cost in previous work. We use a transformer encoder as a feature extractor to extract temporal and spatial features from wearable sensors more efficiently. Using the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as the evaluation criterion, the experimental results show that the average error of the predicted values using the transformer as a feature extractor improved by 32% compared to the RNN architecture and by 25% compared to the LSTM architecture. Finally, we use Gate_MSE to solve the problem of a large peak error in GRF prediction. Meanwhile, this paper explores the effect of the number of wearable sensors or wearable modes on GRF prediction.