Tracking body pose on-the-go could have powerful uses in fitness, mobile gaming, context-aware virtual assistants, and rehabilitation. However, users are unlikely to buy and wear special suits or sensor arrays to achieve this end. Instead, in this work, we explore the feasibility of estimating body pose using IMUs already in devices that many users own — namely smartphones, smartwatches, and earbuds. This approach has several challenges, including noisy data from low-cost commodity IMUs, and the fact that the number of instrumentation points on a user’s body is both sparse and in flux. Our pipeline receives whatever subset of IMU data is available, potentially from just a single device, and produces a best-guess pose.
Published at ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023)