A mobile acquisition system and a method for hips sway fluency assessment

The present contribution focuses on the estimation of the Cartesian kinematic jerk of the hips’ orientation during a full three-dimensional movement in the context of enabling eHealth applications of advanced mathematical signal analysis. The kinematic jerk index is estimated on the basis of gyroscopic signals acquired offline through a smartphone. A specific free mobile application is used to acquire the gyroscopic signals and to transmit them to a personal computer through a wireless network. The personal computer elaborates the acquired data and returns the kinematic jerk index associated with a motor task. A comparison of the kinematic jerk index value on a number of data sets confirms that such index can be used to evaluate the fluency of hips orientation during motion. The present research confirms that the proposed gyroscopic data acquisition/processing setup constitutes an inexpensive and portable solution to motion fluency analysis. The proposed data-acquisition and data-processing setup may serve as a supporting eHealth technology in clinical bio-mechanics as well as in sports science.