Motion Capture using Inertial Sensors

We are developing wearable motion capture devices using inertial measurement units (IMUs). Our focus is on shoulder health, specifically monitoring stresses and providing feedback to the user in order to help prevent injury. Another application is in physical therapy guidance. The following two videos illustrate how the device can capture the arm’s orientation as a function of time.

The subject is performing four repetitions of an external rotation with the arm elevated to 90 degrees. The second video shows the three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope measurements, along with a replay of the arm’s orientation (shown as the device’s three orthogonal axes).

Presenting at CubeSat Workshop, SmallSat 2015, Logan, UT

I will be presenting at the CubeSat Workshop on August 8th, part of the annual conference on Small Satellites on the campus of Utah State University, in Logan, UT. The presentation is about our design of a miniature star camera for small satellites and CubeSats in particular. The goal is to build a camera and develop image processing algorithms to implement a star imager at the scale of modern smart-phone cameras, which will enable the use of an array of cameras on a CubeSat.

The Workshop and Conference schedules can be found here.

Distributed Star Imaging for CubeSats

Real-Time Motion Capture Using Wearable Inertial Sensors

A senior design project I’ve advised on developing real-time motion capture using wearable inertial sensors recently concluded. The work was done by a group of four undergraduate students; Jingwei Luo, Yi Wang, Yongxu Yao, and Jun Yu. The following two videos highlight their results.

The wearable units consist of an STM32L series ARM Cortex-M3 controller, and a single-chip Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), which contains a set of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetic field sensors along three orthogonal axes.