Design of a Capacitance Sensor for Human Intention Detection of Daily Living Activities

As many countries enter an aging society, the demand of wearable robots are increasing. To apply wearable robots in daily life, the intention recognition of the wearers is of great important. Although this research field has been extensively studied in the last decade, still the physical intention recognition based approaches are facing different challenges and in particular when used in assistive and rehabilitation scenarios. In this paper, we propose to monitor muscular activities of the shank and movement of the ankle joint by using capacitance sensors. The proposed capacitance sensor monitor the electrodermal activities under the human skin. The human skin has capacitance when an external current is applied and muscular activities can change the capacitance. To verify the proposed capacitance sensor, the human joint angle was measured by two inertial sensors and the capacitance sensor on the shank at once. The electromyogram(EMG) signals were also compared to verify the performance of the intention detection device based on the capacitance sensors. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.