Inertial Measurement Units for Human Body Monitoring, Healthcare, and Sports
1Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy
2Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
Inertial Measurement Units for Human Body Monitoring, Healthcare, and Sports
Description
In the last few years, wearable technologies have increasingly gained importance in biomedical research, being unobtrusive and minimally intrusive for the subject. In particular, inertial measurement units (IMU) showed an increasing role in human movement assessment, allowing the measurement of a number of movement related parameters outside of instrumented laboratories. Based on these characteristics, IMUs have been used for assessing balance and gait parameters in pathological subjects, in order to evaluate disease development and therapy outcomes. Further, they found a significant increase in sports related applications, allowing to characterize athletic performance and quantify training results and improvements.
However, the specific features of each considered pathology or motor task lead to a large number of possible approaches regarding dedicated filtering techniques, integration of accelerometers, gyroscope and magnetometer signals and the optimal experimental setup in terms of number of IMUs, their positioning on human body, and signals treatment.
This special issue encourages the submission of original research articles presenting novel techniques and applications of inertial measurement units in the area of movement analysis. Authors are encouraged to submit articles dealing with filtering techniques and signal treatment procedures for IMUs signals, as well as applications in clinical and sports related scenarios. Particular attention will be devoted to inertial measurement units' application to pathological subjects and rehabilitation assessment.
Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Novel filtering techniques
- Integration of accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer signals
- Influence of number and position of sensors on measure performance
- Novel protocols dedicated to specific motor tasks
- Real-life applications of IMUs
- Monitoring in healthcare
- Application for specific sport motor tasks