Upper body motion tracking system with inertial sensors for ergonomic issues in industrial environments

Recently, motion tracking techniques to acquire human body movements have broadened their range of applications from sports training, to rehabilitation, to ergonomics issues. For industrial applications, motion capture systems are largely used to acquire workers movements to improve working conditions, comfort, safety, etc. Several tracking solutions have been provided to analyze trunk and upper limbs movement based on different sensing technologies such as optical systems, audio systems, radar systems, magnetic systems, inertial systems and mechanical motion systems. Motion tracking with inertial sensors has been an active research area due to its several advantages. In this paper the authors introduce a motion tracking method of arbitrary human upper body motion. Low cost wearable inertial sensors and CPU unit are used in the proposed approach to track the upper body movement in 3D space and in real time.