Joint Angles Of Human Body Research Articles

Method for joint flexion angle estimation using UWB ranging with clock model compensation

This paper presents a wearable system for measurement and monitoring human body joint angles based on UWB ranging. The DW1000 chip was used with standard deviation of distance measurement within 10 cm with range up to 70 m. We propose a method for enhancing range measurement accuracy based on an estimator which compensates clock imperfections and relative pairwise movement of nodes. Since the estimator is valid only for small slices of time, we propose continuous motion estimation algorithm based on segment-by-segment data processing and stitching results into a final solution. The pairwise distances are approximated with Taylor series of a given order L in short measurement windows while timestamps are compensated with clock parameters of a first-order clock model. The main contribution of the proposed method is the ability to implement joint angle estimation by using low-cost off-the-shelf UWB components, without high-precision clock sources or a need for wired or wireless time synchronization. In order to determine an optimum order L and time slice length, Sprague and Geers' metric was used. The method was experimentally evaluated in static and dynamic conditions. The results show that the accuracy of the proposed system is comparable to similar solutions based on laboratory equipment.

Applying riding-posture optimization on bicycle frame design

Customization design is a trend for developing a bicycle in recent years. Thus, the comfort of riding a bike is an important factor that should be paid much attention to while developing a bicycle. From the viewpoint of ergonomics, the concept of “fitting object to the human body” is designed into the bicycle frame in this study. Firstly, the important feature points of riding posture were automatically detected by the image processing method. In the measurement process, the best riding posture was identified experimentally, thus the positions of feature points and joint angles of human body were obtained. Afterwards, according to the measurement data, three key points: the handlebar, the saddle and the crank center, were identified and applied to the frame design of various bicycle types. Lastly, this study further proposed a frame size table for common bicycle types, which is helpful for the designer to design a bicycle.

A Novel Approach to Joint Flexion/Extension Angles Measurement Based on Wearable UWB Radios

In this paper, a new method for measuring and monitoring human body joint angles, which uses wearable ultrawideband (UWB) transceivers mounted on body segments, is proposed and investigated. The model is based on providing a high ranging accuracy (intersensor distance) between a pair of transceivers placed on the adjacent segments of the joint center of rotation. The measured distance is then used to compute the joint angles based on the law of cosines. The performance of the method was compared with a flexible goniometer by simultaneously measuring joint flexion-extension angles at different angular velocities, ranging between 8 and 90(°) /s. The measurement errors were evaluated by the average differences between two sets of data (ranging from 0.8(°) for slow movement to 2.8(°) for fast movement), by standard deviation (ranging from 1.2(°) to 4.2(°) for various movement speeds) and by the Pearson correlation coefficient (greater than 0.99) which demonstrates the very good performance of the UWB-based approach. The experimental results have shown that the system has sufficient accuracy for clinical applications, such as rehabilitation.