We present NeckSense, a novel wearable system for head pose tracking that leverages multi-channel bio-impedance sensing with soft, dry electrodes embedded in a lightweight, necklace-style form factor. NeckSense captures dynamic changes in tissue impedance around the neck, which are modulated by head rotations and subtle muscle activations. To robustly estimate head pose, we propose a deep learning framework that integrates anatomical priors, including joint constraints and natural head rotation ranges, into the loss function design. We validate NeckSense on 7 participants using the current SOTA pose estimation model as ground truth. Our system achieves a mean per-vertex error of 25.9 mm across various head movements with a leave-one-person-out cross-validation method, demonstrating that a compact, line-of-sight-free bio-impedance wearable can deliver head-tracking performance comparable to SOTA vision-based methods.
@article{arxiv.2507.12884,
title = {From Neck to Head: Bio-Impedance Sensing for Head Pose Estimation},
author = {Mengxi Liu and Lala Shakti Swarup Ray and Sizhen Bian and Ko Watanabe and Ankur Bhatt and Joanna Sorysz and Russel Torah and Bo Zhou and Paul Lukowicz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.12884},
year = {2026}
}