Measurement of Hand Joint Angle Using Inertial-Based Motion Capture System

The inertial sensor motion capture system has significant advantages over the classical optical motion capture system, including its high versatility, portability, and affordability. However, its accuracy is over one order of magnitude lower than the optical system. The measurement error of the finger joint angle is mainly due to sensor drift and misalignment of sensor to finger segment. In this article, we propose a method that includes both orientation estimation and calibration for accurate joint angle estimation. Specifically, at first, the accuracy of the sensor orientation is greatly improved using the square root cubature Kalman filter (SRCKF) to fuse the magnetic and inertial measurement units (MIMUs) data. Second, the kinematic restrictions of the finger joints are used for initial and in-process calibration to achieve sensor-to-segment (StoS) calibration throughout the process. Finally, the difference between the orientation of the two adjacent segments is the joint angle. Experiments show that our proposed system improves joint measurement accuracy compared with the existing inertial sensor-based systems. Evaluation of ten participants showed that the average root mean square error (RMSE) of finger joint measurements is 5.5(?)(+/- 4.0(?)). Our proposed system provides accurate information in measuring hand joint angles and quantifying hand movement function in clinical practice.