A Wearable Sense of Balance Monitoring System towards Daily Health Care Monitoring

We implemented a wearable system for detecting accelerations of the user's head while standing still for the purpose of developing a daily health care application. A 2axis accelerometer was attached on the top of the user's head to separately detect faint accelerations in both the front to back and right to left directions. The total weight of the headset device is only 195 grams including a 9V NiMH battery. This paper presents the results of several experiments performed with the headset system. First, we observed healthy subjects under normal conditions and recorded typical accelerations in the range of 10-30 milli-Gs, which was sufficient to be detected by the system's sensitivity. We then performed numerical analysis on traces of acceleration patterns for a specific user in different conditions. From these analyses we found that the total length of 2-dimensional acceleration pattern trace and a high frequency spectrum (2Hz-10Hz) of right/left acceleration were relat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ISWC
• Authors: Soichiro Matsushita, Toshihiko Oba, Kazuoki Otsuki, Masao Toji, Junichi Otsuki, Kaoru Ogawa
• Keywords: Acceleration, Daily Health Care, ISWC 2003, User's Head