Comfort, Mobility, and Durability Assessment of a Wearable IMU System for EVA Suits

Improving the design of spacesuits to reduce the rate of musculoskeletal injury to the wearer proves challenging due to the inability to observe human motion inside the suit. Past efforts have investigated the use of wearable inertial sensors to observe the motion of the wearer relative to the suit. However, none of these investigated the potential for the sensors themselves to interfere with human motion inside the suit. Additionally, these past systems were found to fail frequently in the harsh in-suit environment. The authors are developing a new in-suit wearable inertial sensor system in order to address the shortcomings faced by previous efforts. The current work describes two test campaigns to evaluate the comfort, mobility, and durability of the new system. Methods and data analysis plans are presented for each test campaign along with pilot study results for the comfort and mobility tests. These tests serve not only to provide verification of the performance of the new system, but also have the potential to allow conclusions to be made about past work using similar devices. The work advances the development of a reliable tool for observing human motion inside the spacesuit, which facilitates the design of safer suits that will be needed for planetary extravehicular activity.