PAMS: a wearable physical activity monitoring system for continuous motion capture in free-living environments

Long term continuously monitoring of human physical activities in free living environments provides valuable information for a wide range of applications. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Physical Activity Monitoring System (PAMS) that can capture human motions which potentially provide many new types of human health assessment and intervention mechanisms for obesity management, rehabilitation, assisted living and human robot interaction. A low power design is applied for PAMS in the hardware/middleware design and the signal processing/filtering algorithms to reduce the number of packets transmitted to the gateway. A full 6-DoF Inertial Measurement Unit is integrated in PAMS to achieve highly reliable inertial data. With highly reliable inertial data, PAMS is designed for a spectrum of applications in healthcare monitoring, electronic entertainment and biokinetics researches. Case studies of real-time human motion tracking via PAMS are demonstrated and performances are evaluated.

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