Contact pressure between the human body and its surroundings has important implications. For example, it plays a role in comfort, safety, posture, and health. We present a method that infers contact pressure between a human body and a mattress from a depth image. Specifically, we focus on using a depth image from a downward facing camera to infer pressure on a body at rest in bed occluded by bedding, which is directly applicable to the prevention of pressure injuries in healthcare. Our approach involves augmenting a real dataset with synthetic data generated via a soft-body physics simulation of a human body, a mattress, a pressure sensing mat, and a blanket. We introduce a novel deep network that we trained on an augmented dataset and evaluated with real data. The network contains an embedded human body mesh model and uses a white-box model of depth and pressure image generation. Our network successfully infers body pose, outperforming prior work. It also infers contact pressure across a 3D mesh model of the human body, which is a novel capability, and does so in the presence of occlusion from blankets.
@article{arxiv.2105.09936,
title = {BodyPressure -- Inferring Body Pose and Contact Pressure from a Depth Image},
author = {Henry M. Clever and Patrick Grady and Greg Turk and Charles C. Kemp},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.09936},
year = {2021}
}