Instrumented shirt to evaluate classical human movements

Among the smart domestic devices developed to provide healthy, elderly, sick or disabled people with a better life in their homes, there are the smart-walkers or the smart-shirt. The first ones permit the patient to move in their home or to do rehabilitation exercises, whereas the second ones monitor the patient´s physical status. In this article, it is presented a smartshirt able to monitor the biomedical parameters and managing some alarms for a robot-walker. In particular, it is evaluated the inertial system of the smart-shirt consisting of an accelerometer. Some typical human movements have been tested. The obtained results permit to know the movements and the positions of a patient using the antro-posterior and medio-lateral angles calculated by the acceleration signals. In the future, this instrumented shirt will be used to indicate to the robot-walker different potential problems, such as a fall or a wrong position.