Wearable motion capture unit for shoulder injury prevention

Body-worn devices have significant potential to improve the health and well-being of many individuals. In this work, wearable inertial sensors are used in order to track and discriminate shoulder motion gestures, without using visual markers or other approaches that constrain the system to a laboratory environment. The device, consisting of a set of orthogonal accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetic field sensors, is attached to the person's upper arm to help prevent shoulder over-use injuries in strenuous work and in athletics. The sensor suite is used to track the orientation of the arm as a function of time. We present a detection and classification approach that can be used to evaluate the number of times certain motion gestures occur.