Skin Temperature Measurement based on Human Skeleton Extraction and Infra-red Thermography - An Application of Sensor Fusion Methods in the Field of Physical Training

Skin temperature measurements play a vital role in the diagnosis of diseases. This topic is also increasingly investigated for applications in the field of physical training. One of the limitations of state-of-the-art methods is the manual, time-consuming way to measure the temperature. Moreover, extant literature gives only little insight into the skin temperature behaviour after the training. The aim of this study was to design an automatic method to measure the skin temperature during and after training sessions for the biceps brachii. For this purpose, we fused thermal images and skeleton data to locate this muscle. We could successfully demonstrate the working principle and observed a temperature increase even several minutes after the end of the training. This study therefore contributes to the automation of skin temperature measurements. A transfer of our approach could be beneficial for other application fields, such as medical diagnostics, as well.