Development of a Wearable Device for Motion Capturing Based on Magnetic and Inertial Measurement Units

This paper presents a novel wearable device for gesture capturing based on inertial and magnetic measurement units that are made up of micromachined gyroscopes, accelerometers, and magnetometers. The low-cost inertial and magnetic measurement unit is compact and small enough to wear and there are altogether thirty-six units integrated in the device. The device is composed of two symmetric parts, and either the right part or the left one contains eighteen units covering all the segments of the arm, palm, and fingers. The offline calibration and online calibration are proposed to improve the accuracy of sensors. Multiple quaternion-based extended Kalman filters are designed to estimate the absolute orientations, and kinematic models of the arm-hand are considered to determine the relative orientations. Furthermore, position algorithm is deduced to compute the positions of corresponding joint. Finally, several experiments are implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed wearable device.