Instrumented shirt to evaluate classical human movements

Among the smart domestic devices developed to provide healthy, elderly, sick or disabled people with a better life in their homes, there are the smart-walkers or the smart-shirt. The first ones permit the patient to move in their home or to do rehabilitation exercises, whereas the second ones monitor the patient's physical status. In this article, it is presented a smartshirt able to monitor the biomedical parameters and managing some alarms for a robot-walker. In particular, it is evaluated the inertial system of the smart-shirt consisting of an accelerometer. Some typical human movements have been tested. The obtained results permit to know the movements and the positions of a patient using the antro-posterior and medio-lateral angles calculated by the acceleration signals. In the future, this instrumented shirt will be used to indicate to the robot-walker different potential problems, such as a fall or a wrong position.