Rilevamento di dati biomeccanici dell'arto superiore su movimenti piani tramite sistemi indossabili e realizzazione di un modello per l'inferenza dell'intera cinematica

This thesis work costitues an EU project, INTERACTION, which aims at developing and validating an unobtrusive and modular system for monitoring daily life activities, physical interactions with the environment and for training upper and lower extremity motor capabilities stroke subjects. This thesis focused on study and analysis of the upper limb biomechanics, starting from the implementation of a mathematical model, represented by 10 Dof a kinematic chain, which takes into account the complex kinematics of the shoulder. In fact, to obtain a reliable description of an accurate kinematics, more advanced than the socket-ball model, the proposed one represents the the shoulder with 6 Dofs, relative to the synergistic mechanism between the glenohumeral and scapulothoracic joints. Using the wearable, sensorized system developed by INTERACTION, an analysis on the experimetal results gathered in performing plan movement of the end-effector has been done. Information from different types of sensors, (e.g. IMU, KPF strain sensors), integrated into the prototype have provieded biomechanical data, highly correlated with the specific movements of the shoulder. These data shown that the mesurement of the shoulder kinematics through IMUs and strain sensors, applied to the new model, improves the quality of the position estimation if compared with the currently used socket-ball model. A optical system has been used as a gold standard during all the experimentation to validate the fitting of the obtained results