A low-power motion capture system with integrated accelerometers [gesture recognition applications]

Motion capture is an emerging technology enabling the design of natural user interfaces for wearable devices based on gestural recognition. However, costs and energy requirements are critical factors to enable their diffusion to low-end wearable systems. Current commercial products do not match these requirements. For this reason, we developed a low-cost/low-power wearable motion tracking system, based on integrated accelerometers, called MOCA (motion capture with accelerometers). Our system is composed of sensing units connected to a control/acquisition board, responsible for reading and preprocessing data, and a mobile terminal running the recognition algorithm. Experiments performed to validate accuracy, power consumption and real-time performance demonstrate low-power and flexibility features of the proposed tracking system as well as its effectiveness as an input interface.