• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.377-386
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• 2015

Joint force/torque estimation by inverse dynamics is a traditional tool in biomechanical studies. Conventionally for this, kinematic data of human body is obtained by motion capture cameras, of which the bulkiness and occlusion problem make it hard to capture a broad range of movement. As an alternative, inertial motion sensing using cheap and small inertial sensors has been studied recently. In this research, the performance of inertial motion sensing especially to calculate inverse dynamics is studied. Kinematic data from inertial motion sensors is used to calculate ground reaction force (GRF), which is compared to the force plate readings (ground truth) and additionally to the estimation result from optical method. The GRF estimation result showed high correlation and low normalized RMSE(R=0.93, normalized RMSE<0.02 of body weight), which performed even better than conventional optical method. This result guarantees enough accuracy of inertial motion sensing to be used in inverse dynamics analysis.