Concept and preliminary experiments with a wearable computer vision system for measuring shoe position and orientation

•Design and prototype of a wearable device for measuring shoe position and attitude.•Experiments were performed using 4 healthy subjects.•90% of measurement errors were under 7.54 cm and 16.56 deg.

Presented in this paper is the design and prototype of a self-contained wearable system capable of measuring the relative position and orientation of the wearer’s shoes. The system consists of a camera, eight LED markers, and a single board computer mounted to each shoe. The data processing is performed on-board providing a 6 DoF coordinate system transformation from one shoe to the other at a rate of 15 Hz. Using 4 healthy subjects, experiments were performed to compare this system’s measurements to those of an accurate commercially available system. This system was able to correctly calculate the position and orientation between the shoes with 90% of the measurement errors being less than 7.55 cm and 16.56 deg. Overall, the experiments demonstrate that the shoe localization system is successful, but further development is required to reduce the susceptibility of the system to sources of error.