Analysis of Orientation Error of Triaxial Accelerometers on the Assessment of Energy Expenditure

This paper investigates the effects of orientation error in the positioning of triaxial accelerometers on the assessment of energy expenditure. Four subjects walked on a treadmill at varying velocities ranging from 4km.h-1 to 5km.h-1 . During each test, a triaxial accelerometer attached to the lower back at arbitrary orientations to record body accelerations. Energy expenditure was estimated by the sum of the integrals of the absolute value of accelerometer output from all the three measurement directions. Based on theoretical analysis and experimental observations, it is concluded that small orientation errors (<3deg) have no distinguishable effects on the estimation of energy expenditure. We propose an efficient method to compensate for larger orientation errors. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of this proposed compensation method