Thesis Project Form

Accurate outdoor motion capture is crucial for sport, rehabilitation, and health monitoring, but IMU-only systems suffer from drift and limited position estimation. This thesis addresses the validation of a new wearable platform (GESTUS) based on combining IMU sensors and GNSS receivers for robust outdoor whole-body kinematics.

The thesis aims to evaluate the outdoor performance of the GESTUS platform by comparing its whole-body pose reconstruction with a reference IMU-based motion capture system. Ten healthy adults will perform walking, jogging, maximal acceleration, and change-of-direction tasks on a fixed outdoor course. The work will analyze reconstruction accuracy, precision, drift, and robustness under different sensor configurations, including IMU-only and IMU combined with one, two, or three GNSS receivers. Particular attention will be given to the effects of speed, signal outage, multipath, and vibration on position and pose estimates, with the goal of identifying a minimal but reliable sensor configuration for outdoor applications.

The student will be trained in wearable motion capture, IMU-GNSS sensor setup, outdoor experimental protocols, musculoskeletal modeling, signal synchronization, gait and locomotion analysis.