Abstract

The integration of visual and inertial sensors for human motion tracking has attracted significant attention recently, due to its robust performance and wide potential application. This paper introduces a real-time hybrid solution to articulated 3D arm motion tracking for home-based rehabilitation by combining visual and inertial sen-sors. Data fusion is a key issue in this hybrid system and two dif-ferent data fusion methods are proposed. The first is a determinis-tic method based on arm structure and geometry information, which is suitable for simple rehabilitation motions. The second is a proba-bilistic method based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) in which data from two sensors is fused in a predict-correct manner in order to deal with sensor noise and model inaccuracy. Experimental results are presented and compared with commercial marker-based systems, CODA and Qualysis. They show good performance for the proposed solution. KEY WORDS—sensor fusion, extended Kalman filter, iner-tial sensor, human motion tracking, home-based rehabilitation 1.