Drift compensated inertial position sensor for healthcare patient monitoring

Abstract

In order to provide more effective health care, especially to the elderly, we must enable the physician to monitor the patient outside of the clinic or hospital. A patient's activities are a critical indicator of his or her well-being, and the physician must have an un-intrusive and inexpensive means of monitoring patient activity. The objective of this project was to design and construct a low-cost, low-power, six degree-of-freedom inertial activity monitor that can be used with a portable computer. In this thesis, I describe the design and implementation of a such a monitor that can communicate using several popular peripheral bus protocols. I describe a simple attitude estimation filter and give a qualitative assessment of its performance.