ETHOS: Miniature orientation sensor for wearable human motion analysis

Inertial and magnetic sensors offers a sourceless and mobile option to obtain body posture and motion for personal sports or healthcare assistants, if sensors could be unobtrusively integrated in casual garments and accessories. We present in this paper design, implementation, and evaluation results for a novel miniature attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) named ETHOS using current off-the-shelf technologies. ETHOS has a unit size of 2.5 cm³, which is substantially below most currently marketed attitude heading reference systems, while the unit contains processing resources to estimate its orientation online. Results on power consumption in relation to sampling frequency and sensor use are presented. Moreover two sensor fusion algorithms to estimate orientation: a quaternion based Kalman-, and a complementary filter. Evaluations of orientation estimation accuracy in static and dynamic conditions revealed that complementary filtering reached sufficient accuracy while consuming 46% of a Kalman´s power. The system runtime of ETHOS was found to be 10 hours at a complementary filter update rate of 128Hz. Furthermore, we found that a ETHOS prototype functioned with a sufficient accuracy in estimating hu man movement in real-life conditions using an arm rehabilitation robot.