c ○ Jonathan Feng-Shun Lin 2012I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. Current physiotherapy practice relies on visual observation of the patient for diagnosis and assessment. The assessment process can potentially be automated to improve accuracy and reliability. This thesis proposes a method to recover patient joint angles and automatically extract movement profiles utilizing small and lightweight body-worn sensors. Joint angles are estimated from sensor measurements via the extended Kalman filter (EKF). Constant-acceleration kinematics is employed as the state evolution model. The forward kinematics of the body is utilized as the measurement model. The state and measurement models are used to estimate the position, velocity and acceleration of each joint, updated based on the sensor inputs from inertial measurement units (IMUs). Additional jointlimitconstraintsareimposedtoreducedrift, andanautomatedapproachisdeveloped for estimating and adapting the process noise during on-line estimation
