Deep Full-Body Motion Network for a Soft Wearable Motion Sensing Suit

• Published in: IEEE/ASME transactions on mechatronics Vol. 24; no. 1; pp. 56 - 66
• Main Authors: Kim, Dooyoung, Kwon, Junghan, Han, Seunghyun, Park, Yong-Lae, Jo, Sungho
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Body motion tracking; Body parts; Calibration; Capacitive sensors; deep learning; Detection; Machine learning; Mapping; Power consumption; Redundancy; Sensor phenomena and characterization; Sensors; Shoulder; Signal processing; soft sensors; soft wearables; Stretchability; Tracking; Wearable sensors
• ISSN: 1083-4435; 1941-014X
• DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2018.2874647

Soft sensors are becoming more popular in wearables as a means of tracking human body motions due to their high stretchability and easy wearability. However, previous research not only was limited to only certain body parts, but also showed problems in both calibration and processing of the sensor signals, which are caused by the high nonlinearity and hysteresis of the soft materials and also by the misplacement and displacement of the sensors during motion. Although this problem can be alleviated through redundancy by employing an increased number of sensors, it will lay another burden of heavy processing and power consumption. Moreover, complete full-body motion tracking has not been achieved yet. Therefore, we propose use of deep learning for full-body motion sensing, which significantly increases efficiency in calibration of the soft sensor and estimation of the body motions. The sensing suit is made of stretchable fabric and contains 20 soft strain sensors distributed on both the upper and the lower extremities. Three athletic motions were tested with a human subject, and the proposed learning-based calibration and mapping method showed a higher accuracy than traditional methods that are mainly based on mathematical estimation, such as linear regression.