Wireless Health Institute

The UCLA Wireless Health Institute is a collaboration among the Schools of Engineering, Medicine and Nursing. The goal is to enable personalized and lower cost care through the application of modern sensing and information technologies to the practice of medicine. The research is distinguished by considering the complete end to end system, including such important issues as ease of use, deployment logistics and integration into existing practice.

The research pursued in Prof. Pottie’s group focuses on robust inference of human motions using low cost devices, including inertial sensors worn on the body and short-range depth camera systems such as the Kinect. At the lowest level of decision granularity, we would like to know whether a person is active or not. The next level is to determine the type of activity being pursued, and finally, we would like to characterize the quality of the activity. With such information, rehabilitation patients or athletes could receive feedback on whether exercises are being performed properly, and clinicians or coaches could track progress and change training regimens appropriately for faster learning of physical skills. All of this could be determined if we knew the trajectories of the limbs. Unfortunately, while in principle it is possible to determine trajectories of particular limbs through integration of accelerometer and gyroscope data, in practice noise and sensor drift quickly make the estimates of position inaccurate with low-cost devices. Thus, models of the motion must be constructed in order to correct for these errors, using an iteration between multiple decision levels. Moreover, members of the general public will not consistently place sensors on the body in the same position and orientation, causing further errors in motion reconstruction. We can use a combination of motion models, classification of opportunistic motions such as walking, and motions captured in front of depth cameras to determine the unknown sensor pose.

For more information on the WHI, click here.