On-body inertial and magnetic sensing for assessment of hand and finger kinematics

A novel instrumentation is proposed to estimate hand and finger movements. Current dataglove systems often measure a reduced set of joint angles and lack a position and orientation measure of the hand with respect to the trunk. Our proposed system, based on inertial and magnetic sensing, is fully ambulatory, light weighted, has a low energy consumption and is therefore suitable to assess kinematics of the hand and fingers in daily life. Results showed an rms difference of the hand pose with an optical reference system of 16.9±4.0 mm for the position and 1.5±0.4 deg for the orientation. Index finger tip positions could be estimated with 5.0±0.5 mm for flexion extensions movements and 12.4±3.0 mm for more complex movements in which both flexion-extension and abduction-adduction movements were involved.