Deep-rooted into Chinese medicine, martial arts, and philosophy, Qigong is a millennia-old practice devoted to enhancing one’s awareness of their own body. The true mastery of this technique can be achieved through repeated movement training in a state of deep meditation called Wuxin (no mind). Two years ago, when I was reading about Chinese culture or more specifically, Taijiquan, I was grabbed by these concepts as both Wuxin and the improvement of the spatial perception of the body targeted by Qigong are essential to achieving the best results in sports that I’m passionate about. Mountain biking, rock climbing, and skiing all involve complex motion, that experts in the field tirelessly try to optimize through a careful study of its dynamics. Inspired by the ancient eastern practices and motivated to make my own contribution to the world of cutting-edge technology that surrounds sports I started the work on my current project.

4 years ago, I’ve gathered a team and started an independent research project on applications of inertial motion capture technologies as a part of Project in a Box student organization. Together with a team of 9, we’ve been making progress towards making a functional system while learning industry applicable skills. As I mentioned in the independent projects section, I’m a huge believer in project based learning. This project is quite unique, because it lies at the intersection of many fields of science (physics, biology) and engineering (mechanical, electrical, software [full-stack]) combining many useful skills that one needs to learn and apply in order to see the outcome. For me, this was a perfect material for an ultimate proving ground in system design and project management. 

The vision for COBEY project is to create an ultimate interface between the human body and the virtual world. My team and I have been developing a wearable inertial motion capture system that aims to improve the process of human motor learning for those who currently don’t have access to feedback from experts. The design utilizes 9-axis inertial measurement units (IMUs) to record acceleration and angular velocity at every major joint in the human body to calculate estimates of their position and orientation for further analysis.

Having such universal data, different applications would require only slight adjustments in the functionality of the system and could range from sports and medicine through art and education to robotics and VR gaming. Once the technology is ready to bloom, we will start building a platform where artists, athletes, and game developers can share their recordings with others.

With more data, we can provide a more informative statistical analysis, build a better understanding of human biokinetics, and consequently more accurate, AI-powered motion capture algorithms. Ultimately, the system will be embeddable in clothing and comfortable for daily use. Given that it would be accurate and reliable enough, it can become extremely useful in the medical industry by analyzing the gathered experience and medical history of the user to immediately issue injury predictions for paramedics to reduce the response and diagnosis time.