Abstract

Human body motion capture is of great utility for the medicine field since it can help to prevent, diagnose and treat several diseases. Such a capture can be done by using systems composed of inertial sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. These sensors are integrated together with processors, batteries and transmitters to form Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). IMUs are placed on the different parts of the patient’s body that want to be monitored. In order to obtain accurate measurements, a calibration process and different filtering algorithms need to be applied in a strategy known as sensor fusion. Through proper signal processing, a good level of performance can be achieved for low cost systems. This fact helps the generalization of the use of IMUs in home and hospital scenarios. Telerehabilitation, Activities of Daily Life (ADL) analysis, gait and posture analysis, acute and nocturnal epileptic seizures detection, motor crisis detection, and diagnosis and monitoring of sleep disorders are some of the possible applications of human body position monitoring systems.