Wearable Sensing for Breaststroke Phase Monitoring with Lower Limb Muscle-Joint Synergy

• Published in: IEEE transactions on instrumentation and measurement Vol. 73; p. 1
• Main Authors: Guo, Jiajie, Liu, Yuchao, Guo, Chuxuan, Liu, Zijie, Li, Yike, Wu, Xuan, Wang, Qining, Xiong, Caihua
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Automation; Deformation; Exoskeletons; flexible sensor; human-centered robotics; joint angle; Joints (anatomy); Kinematics; machine learning; Manufacturing engineering; Monitoring; muscle deformation; Muscles; Phase estimation; phase segmentation; Robot sensing systems; Robotics; Robustness; Sensors; Sports; swimming gait monitoring; Underwater; Wearable sensing; Wearable technology
• ISSN: 0018-9456; 1557-9662
• DOI: 10.1109/TIM.2023.3343771

Motivated by the need for underwater exoskeleton control, swimming phase monitoring is critical to adjust robotic assistance to human motions. However, harsh underwater environments bring in challenges of poor robustness and serious disturbances to the few available sensing methods leading to coarse phase segmentation. Given skeletal muscle activation for limb joint motions, this paper proposes a muscle-joint synergy method to combine muscle mechanics captured by a novel capacitive sensor with joint kinematics by traditional inertial measurements. Development of the wearable sensing system is provided with details on design, fabrication and assembly. The muscle-joint synergy model is rigorously formulated and experimentally validated with breaststroke data for the first time. Immediate applications are illustrated with discrete mode identification and continuous phase monitoring, justifying the robustness of the proposed method to various artificial intelligent algorithms and different tested subjects. This work is anticipated to be valuable to unveil the mechanism of human natural motions for human-centered robotics, sport science and rehabilitation engineering in the future.