Towards Recognizing Tai Chi - An Initial Experiment Using Wearable Sensors

Inexpensive wearable sensors are well-suited for the automatic recognition of many activities occuring in everyday life. But what about fast and involved movements such as those occuring in athletic sports? We tackle this question by studying the feasibility of using body-worn gyroscopes and acceleration sensors to recognize Tai Chi movements. To this end, we conducted an initial experiment with eight sensors each affixed to four different persons who repeatedly performed three distinct Tai Chi movements. The resulting data confirm that standard thresholding and pattern-matching techniques should suffice to automate the analysis and recognition of the movements. Moreover, the data also seem to allow for distinguishing between certain levels of expertise and quality in executing the movements.