Comparison and validation of capacitive accelerometers for health care applications

Fall detection, gait analysis and context recognition are examples of applications where capacitive accelerometers are widely used in health care. In most of the existing work, algorithms were developed for a specific platform and accelerometers were used without explicitly choosing a specific type. With this work we present an inexpensive and practical test setup for replicable and repeatable testing of accelerometers. In addition we use this setup to evaluate six of the most commonly available accelerometers today and list their outcomes for linearity, power consumption and correlation of the tested sensors. We also attempt to an answer to the question of whether applications and algorithms developed for one platform and one type of accelerometer can be easily transferred to another accelerometer.