Estimation of 2-D center of mass movement during trunk flexion-extension movements using body accelerations

Motions of the center of body mass (COM) and body segment acceleration signals are commonly used to indicate movement performance and stability during standing activities. The COM trajectory is usually calculated by video motion analysis, which has a time consuming setup and also is not readily available in all clinical settings. In this paper, we present a novel method to estimate the COM trajectory from the upper and lower limb accelerations, based on experimental data. We have modeled the relationships that exist between the 2-D hip and trunk acceleration data with the 2-D COM trajectory in the sagittal plane, during four trunk flexion-extension movement tasks and estimated the COM trajectory based on that model. The model accounted for between 93 +/- 9% to 97 +/- 3% of the resultant COM trajectory's variability, depending on the task. This corresponded to a range of absolute error between the true and estimated COM trajectories of 0.65 +/- 0.62 to 1.07 +/- 1.13 cm. The advantage of this model compared to our previous work on COM trajectory estimation is that it does not require any calibration and provides a reasonably accurate estimation of the COM trajectory, which can be used to study human balance performance in any clinical setting.