The Utility of Calibrating Wearable Sensors before Quantifying Infant Leg Movements

Abstract

While interest in using wearable sensors to measure infant leg movement is increasing, attention should be paid to the characteristics of the sensors. Specifically, offset error in the measurement of gravitational acceleration (g) is common among commercially available sensors. In this brief report, we demonstrate how we measured the offset and other errors in three different off-the-shelf wearable sensors available to professionals and how they affected a threshold-based movement detection algorithm for the quantification of infant leg movement. We describe how to calibrate and correct for these offsets and how conducting this improves the reproducibility of results across sensors.

Keywords

• calibration
• movement quantification
• offset error
• inertial measurement unit (IMU)
• wearable sensors
• reproducibility