Numerical study on the improvement of detection accuracy for a wireless motion capture system

A detection technique having an accuracy of better than 1 mm is required for body motion analysis in the field of medical treatment. A wireless magnetic motion capture system is one such effective detection technique. We propose a candidate system using an LC resonant magnetic marker (LC marker). Previous studies have showed that the system is capable of repeatable position detection accuracy of better than 1 mm if the system has an adequate signal-to-noise (S/N ratio). However, there are some cases in which the detection results include unignorable errors because some approximations, e.g. a magnetic dipole assumption of the LC marker, are applied to solve the inverse problem to determine the position and orientation of the LC marker. Therefore, a numerical analysis is employed to realize a motion capture system having a high detection accuracy. To elucidate the problem of detection error, the influence of variations in the sizes of the LC marker and the pick-up coil are considered in the numerical simulation. After studying the analysis, the main cause of detection error is determined to be the size of the pick-up coil rather than the size of the LC marker. It was also is found that a pick-up coil measuring 10 mm in diameter with a wound coil width of 1 mm achieves a detection accuracy of better than 0.1 mm.