UNISEP: A Unified Sensor Placement Framework for Human Motion Capture and Wearables

arXiv:2412.21159v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The proliferation of wearable sensors and monitoring technologies has created a need for standardized sensor placement protocols. While existing standards like the Surface Electromyography for Non-Invasive Assessment of Muscles (SENIAM) recommendations for electromyography (EMG) and the 10-20 system for electroencephalography (EEG) address modality-specific applications, no comprehensive framework spans different sensing modalities and applications. We present the Unified Sensor Placement (UNISEP) framework to facilitate reproducible handling of human movement and physiological data across various systems and research domains. The framework provides a method to describe coordinate systems and placement protocols based on anatomical landmarks, and is designed to complement existing data-sharing standards such as the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) and Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED). Even during its proposal stage, the UNISEP approach has been adopted by the EMG-BIDS extension (BIDS version 1.11.0), confirming the community need for a unified, machine-readable sensor placement framework. The UNISEP framework facilitates consistency, reproducibility, and interoperability in applications ranging from lab-based clinical biomechanics to continuous health monitoring in everyday life.