Institute-Funded Research Team to Develop Next-Generation Body Motion Tracker
How do you develop a state-of-the-art body motion tracker that can help athletes, rehabilitation patients, and even people with disabilities? Bring together a mechanical engineer, computer scientist, and physical therapist/physiologist.
That’s exactly what Sheryl Grace, associate professor of mechanical engineering (ENG); Richard West, associate professor of computer science (CAS); and Cara Lewis, associate professor at BU’s College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College (SAR) and director of the SAR Human Adaptation Laboratory, are doing. Funded by a Hariri Research Award, the three are developing an “electronic mirror,” a wearable body motion–tracking device that can help wearers get instant, objective feedback on their movements.
The project was highlighted in a BU Research article, which points out its potential to change the way trainers and therapists work with athletes and patients:
“Our goal is to develop a cheap, effective suite of sensors that we can use for biokinematic data acquisition,” says Grace. Figuring out how to collect the sensor data, and then turn it into useful information, will require knowledge of not only human physiology but computer science and engineering as well.
Grace, West, and Lewis have already scoped out the basic parameters for the device. It will include five postage-stamp-sized motion trackers that a person will wear on their legs, arms, back, or other body parts. Each tracker will hold an accelerometer (a tiny sensor that detects changes in speed and turns them into electric signals), a gyroscope for measuring rotation, and a compass. By combining the data from all five trackers, the system will be able to get an instant, accurate fix on body position, especially the angles of the joints.
Today, serious athletes and rehabilitation patients typically use cameras to watch and refine their body motion. For example, to train for the Rio Olympics, the United States swim team relied on underwater cameras that recorded light from LEDs stuck to the swimmers’ wrists, shoulders, hips, knees, ankles, and toes. Lewis, who helps patients with hip pain change their walking habits to make movement more comfortable, uses a similar approach to evaluate the gait of patients in her lab. While patients walk on a treadmill, she records their movement using a network of 10 wall-mounted cameras, and then later merges the two-dimensional videos to create a 3D version. It takes at least a day of work to process the images, so patients usually have to wait a week or longer to get results. “That is a huge limitation,” says Lewis.
A wearable motion tracker, including an accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass.
Another limitation: while stationary cameras work in closed environments, like a pool or a lab, they don’t translate well to the expanse of a hockey rink or to everyday settings like roads and sidewalks, where bumps and curbs can turn an ordinary walk into an obstacle course. “The proposed system can record movement out in the real world during real activities,” says Lewis. “By being able to record how someone is moving out in the real world and in real time, we could give the person feedback on that movement.”
The Hariri Research Awards are designed to support research that applies data-driven and/or computational approaches through joint research efforts from faculty in different disciplines. In pursuit of this goal, the Institute supports a portfolio of ambitious research projects and activities that align with its mission to catalyze new directions and collaborations in cross-disciplinary research. By supporting projects in social sciences, humanities, law, business, and medicine – to engineering, computer science, and statistics, the Research Awards advance the Institute’s goal of bringing together and building a community of researchers across schools and colleges at BU. The collaboration between West, Grace, and Lewis is an exciting example of how bringing faculty together across the landscape of academic disciplines can catalyze research for a better society.
