Wearable Leg Movement Monitoring System for High-Precision Real-Time Metabolic Energy Estimation and Motion Recognition

Comprehensive and quantitative assessment of human physical activity in daily life is valuable for healthcare, especially for those who suffer from obesity and neurological disorders or are at high risk of dementia. Common wearable devices, e.g., smartwatches, are insufficient and inaccurate for monitoring highly dynamic limb movements and assessing human motion. Here, we report a new wearable leg movement monitoring system incorporating a custom-made motion sensor with machine learning algorithm to perceive human motion accurately and comprehensively during diverse walking and running actions. The system enables real-time multimodal perceptions of personal identity, motion state, locomotion speed, and energy expenditure for wearers. A general law of extracting real-time metabolic energy from leg movements is verified although individual gaits show differences. In addition, we propose a novel sensing configuration combining unilateral lower leg movement velocity with its angular rate to achieve high accuracy and good generalizability while simplifying the wearable system. Advanced performances in personal identification (accuracy of 98.7%) and motion-state recognition (accuracy of 93.7%) are demonstrated. The wearable system also exhibites high-precision real-time estimations of locomotion speed (error of 3.04% to 9.68%) and metabolic energy (error of 4.18% to 14.71%) for new subjects across various time-varying conditions. The wearable system allows reliable leg movement monitoring and quantitative assessment of bodily kinematic and kinetic behaviors during daily activities, as well as safe identity authentication by gait parameters, which would greatly facilitate smart life, personal healthcare, and rehabilitation training.