Head Motion Recognition Using a Smart Helmet for Motorcycle Riders

This paper presents a head motion detection and recognition study using a smart helmet for motorcycle rider which can potential be used for the analysis of behavior of motorcycle riders. The smart helmet is a full face motorcycle helmet integrated with an intelligent system embedded an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor. In the analysis, the motions and the corresponding signals are assessed with the video footage with a data acquisition and visualization platform. We introduce a feature extraction methodology to extract the most discriminant features from the signal data, and the head motion recognition problem is formulated as a machine-learning based classification model. Experiment results show that gyroscope sensor data is more useful than accelerometer sensor data for head motion recognition and the classification accuracy for different head motions ranges from 95.9% to 99.1%.