MEMS Accelerometers Sensors: an Application in Virtual Reality

Abstract: The measurement of a particular human body member position is extremely important in many applications. The human behavior understanding typically involves the body posture analysis or estimation, as well as the generated corresponding gestures. This behavior characterization allows analyzing, interpreting, and animating human actions and therefore enables us the use of experimental methodologies. Using the virtual reality devices to facilitate people’s lives, they can help to train and improve the actions of an Olympic athlete, for example and imitation of human actions by robotic systems. The systems development to monitor human body members’ movements is a growing interesting area, both in entertainment and in systems to help physically disabled people, as that developing assistive technology. To contribute to this area, this paper presents the experimental development of an instrumented glove prototype of low cost for the recognition of hand inclination movements, using a Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) accelerometer, by virtual reality concepts for demonstration in real time. We present the hardware that was developed, the calibration procedures, the achieved results with their statistical corresponding validation. The results allowed to state that the system is suitable for the inclination measurement in a 2D plan, thus allowing its use in entertainment systems and as an auxiliary device for assistive technology system.

Keywords: Virtual reality, Accelerometer, MEMS technology, Instrumented glove

Click <here> or title of paper to download the full pages article (1.72 Mb)