Human upper limb movement assessment based on wearable sensors

The advances in medical technologies have continued to improve diagnostic and measurement devices, eventually leading to better healthcare. Glove-based systems represent one of the most important efforts aimed at acquiring hand movement data. On the other hand, inertial motion sensor is the best device for biomechanics studies because it is transportable, small, low cost, ease to be set up and less burdensome to the subject. However, processing and accuracy of the data obtained are essential issues for research purposes. The work in this dissertation are divided into three studies as follow: The first, is to analyze hand function after hand surgery as it represents the first step the clinician has to address before defining the rehabilitation procedure and to follow the rehabilitation process for any patient. In this research, the Range of Motion (ROM) for all fingers and the ability of participants to repeat two ADL (Activities of Daily Living)-based tasks were investigated. For two patient subjects, the results were compared to that of healthy subjects. The major goals is to furnish the clinicians a tool capable of measuring objectively human hand movements and quantify the recovery of motor function during the rehabilitation. The second study, is to validate the inertial-based system as a wearable sensor for upper limb motion analysis with optical tracking system used for co-registration as a gold standard system. The estimated angles between elbow and wrist joints of two systems were compared to address the challenges. Furtherly the inertial sensors allow clinicians to record human movements performed in normal activity daily life, so that they can remotely study the results. It is capable of tracking human upper limb motions, reconstructing the human model, monitoring human health status, positioning and recording human itinerary in ADL environment. The analyzed results will be used to know the accuracy and correlation between two systems. The last study, is to validate the inertial sensor device with minimal human intervention. In addition, design a tri-axial rotational set up (Gimbal) to be used as a reference. The comparison between the actual angular velocity of the inertial sensor and different constant angular speeds of Gimbal was done to calculate the coincident and error with rotating speeds.