Accelerometer-based Body Sensing for Healthy Aging

Wen-Yen Lin1, Wen-Cheng Chou1, Ming-Yih Lee2 and Kin Fong Lei2
Department of Electrical Engineering Graduate Institute of Medical Mechatronics Healthy Aging Research Center, Chang Gung University Tao-Yuan, Taiwan
2 1

Abstract-Accelerometers have been widely used for inertial sensing and applied on various medical applications. Recently, accelerometers are miniaturized using micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) technology that can be easily integrated into various body sensing system and it makes sensing of acceleration becomes simple and low cost. In this paper, we present an introductory discussion on the medical applications using accelerometer-based body sensing; introduce our patent-pending tilting angle identification algorithm; and our research goals and current status of accelerometer-based body sensing for healthy aging in Chang Gung University.

transformation done in real-time by a low cost embedded system. Finally, we present our research goals of accelerometer-based body sensing for healthy aging on the aspects of health promotion, healthy aging assessment, and health abnormality alert in Chang Gung University.. II. INFORMATION PROVIDED BY ACCELEROMETERS The raw data measured by an accelerometer are the combination of dynamic acceleration of the movement of the object and the static earth gravity force projected on the single-, duo-, or tri-axial of the devices. In the cases of a triaxial accelerometer, the raw data retrieved from the accelerometers are the acceleration of the combined vector projected on the three axes in a rectangular coordination system, i.e. [Ax, Ay, Az]. The data processed through certain algorithms and more meaningful information: acceleration, distance, and orientation, of the object can be retrieved and used for different applications. A. Acceleration This is the direct meaning of the raw data carried. The magnitude of the data represents the acceleration. Fast magnitude back-and-forth changes within a time period show vibrations. A significant change in magnitude within a short period will be a shock. The information are represented by the raw data of the accelerometers or through some specific data patterns without the needs of complex transforms; therefore, we define them as the explicit information provided by accelerometers. After further processing and analysis, the information can be applied in many medical applications, such as: biomedical parameter measurements: heart rate, respiratory rate, snoring rate, etc., for sleep apnea diagnosis [2], heart rate (HR) and HR trend in real time for physical activity assessment [3], falls-risk estimation [4], wearable automatic fall detectors [5]-[7], and accelerometer-based non-wearable fall detection of elderly people using floor vibrations and sound [8]. B. Distance The distance of a linear movement can be computed by a direct double integration of the acceleration, as in . (1)

I.

INTRODUCTION

There was a significant birth rate increase within 20 years post World War II, 1946 ~ 1964, and people born during that period are called baby boomers who are now in the age of 65 and above. With this information, 2011-12 is the kicking off year of "Age Wave" according to the World Health Organization (WHO) regarding its definition of "old" people who is age of 65 and above. Hence, in the coming 10-20 years, there exist significant demands of tele-care products due to the aging of the societies, lifestyle changes, and lack of medical resources, and also potential market on "Age Wave" associated with healthy aging and health care products. Healthy aging is about staying physically and psychologically healthy in senior years. Early detection, early diagnosis, early warning, and early action (4E) and individual care, intelligent care, interactive care, and integrated care (4I) are proposed to provide development approaches for healthy aging products which are the main researching goals of the "Healthy Aging Research Center" in Chang Gung University. Nowadays, the inertial sensing has been widely used in many fields of applications. Indeed, the 4 out of 5 modes of motion sensing: acceleration, vibration, shock, tilt, but only not rotation, are actually different manifestations of acceleration over different periods of time [1]. As a result the accelerometer-based body sensing systems are developed and mainly targeting for medical applications driven by the increasing demands from Age Wave. In this article, we present the explicit and implicit information that can be retrieved from accelerometer-based body sensing and introduce our broadened survey of it in medical applications. We also discussed the complexity for one of the implicit information transformation, i.e. tilting, and introduce our patent pending algorithm to have the

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The accelerometer-based sensing system can be calibrated when it starts with a still position by setting its initial distance, d0, to zero and then the moving distance can be calculated. To get the distance information from the measured raw data of accelerometers, the calculations of double integration are required; therefore, it is the implicit information provided by accelerometers. However, due to that the measurement noises of accelerometers will be quickly accumulated through the process of integration, the accuracy of the distance information provided by accelerometers is still a big concern. The distance information can be applied on some medical applications, like: compression depth estimation for CPR quality assessment [9], posture analysis for Parkinsons disease [10][11], and walking distance estimation complimented with gyroscope sensor as in [12]-[14]. C. Orientation Another implicit information provided by accelerometers is the orientation. When the net acceleration or force on the system over time is gravity, the projections of the gravity vector on the axes of the accelerometer can be used to determine the static inclination or tilt angles of the system by calculating mathematical trigonometric functions from the projected gravity vector on the 3 axes of the accelerometer. As a matter of facts, it is a process of domain transformation which converts the measured raw data from motion domain in rectangular coordination space, i.e. (Ax, Ay, Az), into the angular domain in spherical coordination space, i.e. ( , , ), as shown in Fig.Figure 1, where is the size of the gravity vector, i.e. 1g, is the angle between x-axis and the projected gravity vector on the x-y plane, and is the angle between zaxis and the gravity vector. The transformation equations between these two coordination spaces can be expressed in (2)

Figure 1. Domain transformation for orientation retrieval

There are many other applications utilizing two or more information provided by accelerometers. For example, the wearable automatic fall detectors are typically combining the shock sensing with tilt information to improve accuracy as in [5]-[7], and [17], Rissanen et al. [18] combined acceleration and the distance information for the analysis of dynamic voluntary muscle contractions in Parkinsons disease, and Khan et al. [19] propose an approach for physical activity recognition with combination of acceleration data and tilt information. III. IMPLEMENTABLE REAL-TIME TILT ANGLE IDENTIFICATION ALGORITHM IN THE EMBEDDED SYSTEMS To retrieve the implicit information, Orientation, as introduced in previous session requires complex domain transformation. The computation of and in the process of transformation is too complicated to implement on a microcontroller in a typical embedded system. Hence, most current researches adopt offline computation [15], streaming the raw data to PC/PDA for computation [20]-[22], and table lookup [16]. However, the offline computation approach could not identify the tilting information in the system; as a result, the system does not have the capability for early detections for some critical behaviors and to generate real time warnings. The streaming approach causes the concerns of excessive RF signal transmission thereby leading to higher system cost and higher power consumption. Table lookup approach requires huge memory space for table storage and produce higher system cost even though memory chips are more and more affordable. We have therefore proposed an intelligent and low complexity algorithm called CGU tilting angle identification algorithm [23]. The algorithm that we proposed is based on 2D CORDIC [24] operations and hence, the algorithm performs only addition/subtraction and shifting operations for the domain transformation to retrieve the tilt angle information. As a result, the whole processing of the algorithm is memoryless and could be implemented in a low power microcontroller-based embedded system for in-line and realtime inclination sensing. The targets of the tilt angle identification are to calculate the two angles defined in (3). The proposed algorithm performs the calculations of each angle with a 2D vectoring mode operation in two phases. The first phase is to calculate angle , 2 defined in (3), as well as Az2 + Ay and the second phase is to calculate the second angle .

Ax = sin cos A y = sin sin Az = cos where, 0 and So given a reading from 3D accelerometer data (Ax, Ay, Az), we can calculate the two angles and as in (3) (2)

= arctan (A y / Ax ) + = / 2 arctan Az / Ax 2 + A y 2
(3)

The term of added in is to have it cover the = 0, if Ax 0 and whole 360 degree range, where otherwise, = 1. = 1, if Ay 0 and otherwise, = -1. This implicit information carried by the accelerometerbased body sensing is typically utilized in many posture reorganization applications, as in [15], and some position monitoring applications, such as heads angle position monitoring after vitreoretinal surgery [16].

Figure 2. CGU tilt angle identification algorithm. Phase I

Figure 4. Accelerometer-based body sensing for Healthy Aging Research in Chang Gung University

Figure 3. CGU tilt angle identification algorithm. Phase II

G Fig. 2 shows the process of phase I . It is to rotate g G vector along X-axis (which becomes g ), as in Fig. 2 (b), without changing angle , and have its projected vector on YZ plane aligned to Y-axis. So, we can look on the Y-Z plane only as shown in Fig. 2 (c). If we rotate the projected vector G g ( Ay , Az ) , on Y-Z plane and have it aligned to Y-axis to 2 2 get the final vector (Ay', 0), and then A = Az + Ay is y accrued through a 2D CORDIC operation with initial 2D 2 2 vector ( Ay , Az ) . The rotated angle and A = Az + Ay are y accrued after the designated iterations of CORDIC vectoring mode operations in phase I. 2 2 Then, in Phase II, we will use the A value, i.e. Az + Ay , y G calculated in Phase I and have the rotated vector ( g ), on XY plane aligned to Y-axis as shown in Fig. 3. The rotation is performed again by a 2D CORDIC vectoring mode operation with initial 2D vector ( Ax , A ) and has it aligned to Y-axis. y After the designated iterations of operations, the angle , is accumulated and then = /2 - .

IV. ACCELEROMETER-BASED BODY SENSING FOR HEALTHY AGING One of the research branches of the Healthy Aging Research Center in Chang Gung University is to conduct the accelerometer-based body sensing for Healthy Aging. To realize the 4E and 4I strategies as in the introduction, we defined three aspects of applications for healthy aging, namely: health promotion, healthy aging assessment, and health abnormality alert. The targets for health promotion are mainly for people who are still in good conditions. We would like to develop systems which could help these people to maintain their health or even get healthier. For example, through the gaiting parameter

analysis, we can remind the people to have adequate amount of walking per day. Assistance with the monitoring of cervical vertebrae inclination angles of people who are walking, standing, or sitting; we could help people to detect if they have proper postures. For healthy aging assessment, the main targets are for people who might be in the middle-to-elderly range, to detect if these people start to have some syndromes of some diseases which that many elderly people suffered, such as Parkinson's disease, or stroke. With the assistance of accelerometer-based body sensing, we can have a long-term monitoring on the people's postures so that we can help the people find their problems of postural instability which is one of the early syndromes of Parkinson's disease. Health abnormality alert is to issue warning signals when there are some critical situations happened or going to happen. For example, we developed an embedded system and implemented the proposed CGU tilt angle identification algorithm in it for real-time and in-line inclination sensing purposes. It works as an early detection and early warning device for people with high falling-risk. It has been identified that people just after surgery and also the elderly people with severely body control problems are the group of people with extremely high falling risks. These people have to lie on the bed most of the time for resting and require immediate support for some circumstances, for example, to get up and go to the restroom. Therefore, a sensing system which can detect these people trying to get out of bed and send out a warning signal to the home care personal or nurse so that their immediate support could prevent those people from falling. A single accelerometer is then attached on the chest of the person and the proposed algorithm is implemented to detecting the body angle in real-time and continuously. When

Figure 5. Application scenario of human fall prevention

the upper body is raised up over 30 degree, the system will be triggered and send out warning signals through Bluetooth wireless communication to a smart phone carried by the nurse or home care personal. Once the smart phone receives the warning signals, the application software will indicate the warning by light up a bulb on the graphical interface and turn it off once the upper body inclination angle falls back to under 25 degree. This application scenario is then illustrated in Fig. 5. V. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, we have an introductory discussion about accelerometer-based body sensing by describing the explicit and implicit information that can be retrieved from accelerometer. We also introduce broadened survey of medical applications using the information. Then, we present our proposed tilt angle identification algorithm which enables the feasibility of implementing a real-time tilt angle identification in embedded system such that the system have the capability for early detections of some critical behaviors and to generate real time warning signals. As a result, we presented an embedded system implementing with the algorithm which identifies people's getting up from lying on the bed so that human fall can be prevented for those people with high falling risk. We have then presented how the accelerometer-based body sensing is contributed to the healthy aging research in Chang Gung University. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported in part by National Science Council, Taiwan, R.O.C. under Grant NSC100-2221-E-182039. The authors would also like to thank the support of High Speed Intelligent Communication (HSIC) Research Center and Healthy Aging Research Center (HARC) in Chang Gung University for the required resources of this work. REFERENCES
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