Monitoring of Hip and Knee Joint Angles Using a Single Inertial Measurement Unit During Lower Limb Rehabilitation

This paper investigated the possibility of estimating 3D lower limb joint kinematics during five popular rehabilitation exercises of the hip and knee joints based on the data collected from a single inertial measurement unit located on the shank. The leg was modeled as a four-degree-of-freedom serial chain, and the relevant joint angles were represented by Fourier series. A least square approach based on the minimization of the difference between the measured and estimated 3D linear accelerations and angular velocities was used to solve the related analytical problem. The approach was validated on ten healthy young volunteers (ten trials each), comparing the proposed approach with the measurements collected through a stereophotogrammetric system. The average root mean square differences between the estimated joint angles and those reconstructed with the stereophotogrammetric system were inferior than 3.2° with correlation coefficients higher than 0.85.