This week I worked with my team to finalize our designs for the proposal presentation, including where we will locate the IMUs (now on the T3, T12, and L5) as well as potentially moving our haptic motors for feedback, from their original location of next to each IMU, to now being placed along the shoulders of the vest (to prevent added noise to the data collected from these IMUs when these motors shake to get the user’s attention). Additionally, I looked into the VQF library we plan to use, including reading the associated research paper, to better understand its potential for integration into our design and the values it would require from our IMUs to be successful. As we discussed in our weekly check-in, the filtering system takes in values from both a gyroscope and an accelerometer, and works to prevent gyroscope bias by calculating a small offset from the gyroscope values and subtracting that from the readings.
Moreover, as recommended in our check-in this past week, I looked into potential experts/people with experience in the posture field to contact for advice or opinions on our current approach and user problem. After talking with my team, I contacted three researchers in the space connected to CMU who published the paper “Robust, Low-cost, Non-intrusive Sensing and Recognition of Seated Postures” and we are hoping to meet with them in the next two weeks. Right now, I feel on track with my schedule, but I am anticipating my workload to increase in the next couple of weeks once we have all of our parts in for PosturePal, and I can start attaching and testing the IMUs. In the next week, I hope to secure meeting times with each of the researchers we contacted, as well as wire the IMUs (if delivered).