Wearable Sensors for Balance and Movement Summer School

The Origins of Balance Deficits and Falls (OBDAF) Research Cluster is hosting a Summer School on "Wearable Sensors for Balance & Movement"

From August 12th to August 16th the OBDAF Cluster hosted our first summer school on Wearable Sensors for Balance and Movement.  The event was organized by Drs. Jean-Sébastien Blouin, Michael Hunt, Laurent Bouyer and Mark Carpenter. With 40 students registered and 12 guest speakers from across Canada and various backgrounds, it was a week filled with exciting talks and learning opportunities. The goal of this weeklong summer school was to educate and train the students on how to use various types of wearable sensors such as including inertial measurement units (IMUs), motion capture, GPS, ultrasound, eye tracking and electromyography (EMG). We also had the pleasure of partnering with companies such as Plantiga, Headcheck, Delsys, Sparkun and Adafruit which kindly contributed to our event with interactive demonstrations and equipment for our group projects. We couldn’t have had such a successful summer school without these companies!

The format of our summer school was for the students to be educated and exposed to various topics related to wearable sensors in the morning through the form of seminars. (For more information about the Guest Speaker Seminars, please refer to this

).  On the first afternoon, we invited companies to come give interactive demonstrations on equipment such as ECG’s and recording insoles. Using the knowledge gained, in the following afternoons, the students were placed in groups of 6-8 students had to work together to design and implement a project involving wearable sensors on a variety of topics and applications. Topics ranged from sensor tracking of postural responses to validation of sensors with motion capture and more! The event concluded with groups presenting their findings and experiences in front a panel of speakers as well as their peers. Congratulations to our two group project winners- Most Innovative Award went to Dr. Jean- Sébastien Blouin’s group on “Open- field Tracking of Human Navigation” and Best Presentation Award went to Dr. Calvin Kuo’s group on “Sensor Tracking of High Impact Events During Daily Activities”.

We thank all the students, guest speakers, companies, and general public who participated in our event! We hope to see everyone again in the future!