Design and fabrication of miniaturized six-degree of freedom piezoresistive accelerometer

This paper reports a novel miniaturized piezoresistive six-degree of freedom (6DOF) accelerometer designed and fabricated using bulk micromachining technology. This accelerometer measures three components of linear acceleration and three components of angular acceleration on three orthogonal axes in the frequency bandwidth of 300Hz. The average measured sensitivities of the fabricated sensor for linear accelerations and angular accelerations show a cross-axis sensitivity of >4%. Comparison of the obtained experimental results and finite element simulation shows good agreement. The sensor is ideal for use in biomechanical research applications such as study of human gesture recognition systems.