Tracking body pose onthego could have powerful uses in fitness, mobile gaming, contextaware virtual assistants, and rehabilitation. However, users are unlikely to buy and wear special suits or sensor arrays to achieve this end. Instead, in this work, we explore the feasibility of estimating body pose using IMUs already in devices that many users own – namely smartphones, smartwatches, and earbuds. This approach has several challenges, including noisy data from lowcost commodity IMUs, and the fact that the number of instrumentation points on a user's body is both sparse and in flux. Our pipeline receives whatever subset of IMU data is available, potentially from just a single device, and produces a bestguess pose. To evaluate our model, we created the IMUPoser Dataset, collected from 10 participants wearing or holding offtheshelf consumer devices and across a variety of activity contexts. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of our system, benchmarking it on both our own and existing IMU datasets.

Citation:
Mollyn, V., Arakawa, R., Goel, M., Harrison, C. and Ahuja, K. 2023. IMUPoser: FullBody Pose Estimation using IMUs in Phones, Watches, and Earbuds. To appear in Proceedings of the 41st Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 23 – 30, 2023). CHI '23. ACM, New York, NY.