To test the system against similar technologies, the researchers had study participants wear it while also wearing two smartwatches and a heart rate monitor. They are purposely lightweight, portable and low cost so that they could be easily integrated in different forms, including clothing, such as smart pants. These sensors are called “inertial measurement units” and measure the acceleration and rotation of the leg as it’s moving. It consists of two small sensors – one on the thigh and one on the shank of one leg – run by a microcontroller on the hip, which could easily be replaced by a smartphone. The system the researchers designed is intentionally simple. “The fact that Patrick’s device has a lower error rate makes sense because it detects motion of your legs and most of your energy is being expended by your legs.” “An issue with traditional smartwatches is they only get information from the movement of your wrist and heart rate,” said Mykel Kochenderfer, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford who is a co-author of the paper. This new measurement system features two sensors on the thigh and shank that are powered by a battery and controlled by a microcontroller, which could be replaced by a smartphone. How people burn calories is complicated, but the researchers had a hunch that sensors on the legs would be a simple way to gain insight into this process. We can also compute the energy spent by a patient recovering from cardiac surgery to better manage their exercise.” Looking to the legs “With Patrick’s new tool, we can estimate how much energy is burned with each step as an Olympic athlete races toward the finish line to get a measure of what is fueling their peak performance. Clark Professor in the School of Engineering, who is co-author of the paper. “This is a big advance because, up till now, it takes two to six minutes and a gas mask to accurately estimate how much energy a person is burning,” said Scott Delp, director of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Stanford and the James H. The list of components and code for making the system are both available. This new wearable system only requires two small sensors on the leg, a battery and a portable microcontroller (a small computer), and costs about $100 to make. Such setups are used to assess health and athletic performance, but they involve bulky, uncomfortable equipment and can be expensive. There are laboratory-grade systems that can accurately estimate how much energy a person burns during physical activity by measuring the rate of exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen in breath. (Consider how a cup of coffee can increase heart rate.) The researchers hypothesized that leg motion would be more telling – and their experiments confirmed that idea. population and found that it does very well, with about one third the error of smartwatches,” said Patrick Slade, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Stanford who is lead author of a paper about this work, published July 13 in Nature Communications.Ī crucial piece of this research was understanding a basic shortcoming of other wearable calorie counters: that they rely on wrist motion or heart rate, even though neither is especially indicative of energy expenditure. “We built a compact system that we evaluated with a diverse group of participants to represent the U.S. A system made with two inexpensive sensors proves to be more accurate than smartwatches for measuring calories burned during activity – and the instructions for making the system yourself are available for free online.
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