Accelerometer

For my annual Still Standing project, I am recording sensor data from my mobile phone while standing still for 10 minutes at a time. This is a highly curiosity-driven and data-based project, and part of the exploration is to figure out what I can get out of the sensors. I have started sharing graphs of the linear acceleration of my sessions with the tag #StillStanding on Mastodon. However, I wondered if this is the sensor data that best represents the motion....

What is the background “noise” in the sensors of a mobile phone? In the fourMs Lab, we have a tradition of testing the noise levels of various devices. Over the last few years, we have been using mobile phones in multiple experiments, including the MusicLab app that has been used in public research concerts, such as MusicLab Copenhagen. I have yet to conduct a systematic study of many mobile phones lying still, but today I tried recording my phone—a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S21—lying still on the table for ten minutes....

I have been using a Fitbit activity tracker over the last couple of months, which has been an exciting experience, and which has triggered me to move more than I otherwise would. For some new experiments we are going to run in the lab, we have bought a bunch of AX3 sensors. These are small accelerometers with long-term storage ability (~30 days of 100Hz recording!), and of course, I wanted to test out how they work....

I was involved in no less than 4 papers at this year’s NIME conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. K. Nymoen, A. Voldsund, S. A. v. D. Skogstad, A. R. Jensenius, and J. Tørresen. **Comparing motion data from an iPod touch to a high-end optical infrared marker-based motion capture system **[PDF] The paper presents an analysis of the quality of motion data from an iPod Touch (4th gen.). Acceleration and orientation data derived from internal sensors of an iPod is compared to data from a high end optical infrared marker-based motion capture system (Qualisys) in terms of latency, jitter, accuracy and precision....