Devolepment of Body Movement Monitoring Bed and its Application to Carer Support

本研究主要实现了人体各部位的位姿估计系统。该系统由压力传感器、分布式床位和身体部位位姿估计软件组成。该软件的算法如下。首先，计算机为估计身体部位的位置和姿势做准备。这台计算机有简单的人体模型。计算机根据简单的人体模型构建许多压力分布图像，并将这些图像累积到内存中。经过积累，计算机开始通过压力传感器分布床得到压力分布图像。该图像与基于模型的压力图像模板进行了比较。基于模型的压力图像模板包含身体部位位置和关节角度信息，因此很容易估计与床接触的身体位置。最后，将估计的位置显示为三维计算机图形图像。实验结果表明，该系统只需根据压力传感器床身的传感数据就能准确地估计出卧位人体各部位的位置。

Body parts positions and posture estimation system is mainly realized in this research. The system consists of a pressure sensor distributed bed and body parts positions and posture estimation software. The algorithm of the software is as follows. At first, a computer prepares for estimating body parts positions and a posture. The computer has simple human models. The computer constructs many pressure distribution images based on the simple human models and accumulates these images to its memory. After accumulation, the computer begins to get a pressure distribution image through the pressure sensors distribution bed. This image is compared with model-based pressure image templates. The model-based pressure image templates contain body parts positions and joint angles information, so body positions contacting with the bed are easily estimated. Finally, an estimated posuture is displayed as three dimensional computer graphics image. Experimental results reveal that the system can estimate lying human's body parts positions accurately only from the sensing data from the pressure sensor bed.