Development of a Contact Based Human Arm Motion Analysis System for Virtual Reality Applications

This paper presents the development of a system for analyzing and adapting the Human Arm motion for virtual reality applications. The proposed system consists of number of Flex sensors, Inertial Measurement Units and Embedded Data Acquisition System, to record the joint angles for deriving the kinematic states (position, velocity and acceleration) of different parts of the human arm. A flexible structure is used for holding the sensors on the human arm at the required position, without hindering the movement. The embedded circuit utilizes a 32-bit Microcontroller to process the data from various sensors and transmits digitized data to the central computer for computing the various kinematics parameters. The system has been tested against standard motion tracking device and is found to perform close to the reference device with an average error of 6% . Such a device can be used to simulate critical operations in medicine and industry and analyze performance during various tasks.