Development of a Wearable Instrumented Vest for Posture Monitoring and System Usability Verification Based on the Technology Acceptance Model

Abstract

Body posture and activity are important indices for assessing health and quality of life, especially for elderly people. Therefore, an easily wearable device or instrumented garment would be valuable for monitoring elderly people’s postures and activities to facilitate healthy aging. In particular, such devices should be accepted by elderly people so that they are willing to wear it all the time. This paper presents the design and development of a novel, textile-based, intelligent wearable vest for real-time posture monitoring and emergency warnings. The vest provides a highly portable and low-cost solution that can be used both indoors and outdoors in order to provide long-term care at home, including health promotion, healthy aging assessments, and health abnormality alerts. The usability of the system was verified using a technology acceptance model-based study of 50 elderly people. The results indicated that although elderly people are anxious about some newly developed wearable technologies, they look forward to wearing this instrumented posture-monitoring vest in the future.

Electronic Skin Wearable Sensors for Detecting Lumbar–Pelvic Movements

“…However, they are heavy and uncomfortable to wear for a long period of time and are usually non-washable [71]. They can also suffer from the same repositioning problem that stickers have when an individual performs movements [53]. E-Skin sensors (resistive flex sensors) provide a suitable solution for detecting and measuring lumbar-pelvic movements.…”

“…The multi-IMU sensor-based garment systems are designed for the measurement of three-dimensional human movement. They commonly have 8 to 12 IMU sensor nodes attached to garments and located on different parts of the human body including the head, shoulder, elbow, wrist, waist, knee, and foot [51][52][53]. Since these systems contain multiple nodes, they can measure different physical activities based on the movements of different body parts.…”

“…The garment is integrated with accelerometers and gyroscopes which make it capable of detect static and dynamic trunk movements with high accuracy (<1.5 degree). However, these garment integrated sensors are expensive, non-washable, and difficult to structure because of the quantity of the IMU sensors [53]. Furthermore, their design has to be personalised for different individuals such as different height and body measures.…”

Application of Evaluation Parameters for Successful Transmission in wireless sensor networks

“…In the field of medicine, the wheezing sound is usually considered as an indicator of the degree of airway obstruction. In [6], authors have developed a wearable instrumented vest for posture monitoring, especially for aged people. The vest provides a portable and low-cost solution that can be used indoors and outdoors to provide long-term care at home.…”

Novel Adaptive Transmission Protocol for Mobile Sensors that Improves Energy Efficiency and Removes the Limitation of State Based Adaptive Power Control Protocol (SAPC)

“…In the field of medicine, the wheezing sound is usually considered as an indicator of the degree of airway obstruction. In [6], authors have developed a wearable instrumented vest …”