Validation of a low-cost inertial motion capture system for whole-body motion analysis

While some low-cost inertial motion capture (IMC) systems are now commercially available, generally, they have not been evaluated against gold standard optical motion capture (OMC). The objective was to validate the low-cost Neuron IMC system with OMC. Whole-body kinematics were recorded on five healthy subjects during manual handling of boxes for about 32 min while wearing 17 magnetic and inertial measurement units with Optotrak clusters serving as a reference. The kinematical model was calibrated anatomically for OMC and with poses for IMC. Local coordinate systems were aligned with angular velocities to dissociate differences due to technology or kinematical model. Descriptive statistics including the root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of multiple correlation (CMC) and limits of agreement (LoA) were applied to the joint angle curves. The average technological error yielded 5.8° and 4.9° for RMSE, 0.87 and 0.96 for CMC and 0.4 ± 8.6° and -0.3 ± 6.0° for LoA about the frontal and transverse axes respectively, whereas the longitudinal axis yielded 10.5° for RMSE, 0.78 for CMC and 3.3 ± 13.1° for LoA. Differences due to technology and to the model contributed similarly to the total difference between IMC and OMC. For many joints and axes, RMSE stayed under 5°, CMC over 0.9 and LoA under 10°, especially for the transverse axis and lower limb. The Neuron low-cost IMC system showed potential for tracking complex human movements of long duration in a normal laboratory environment with a certain error level that may be suitable for many applications involving large IMC distribution.