Vision-based vs. IMU-based upper-limb pose estimation in assisted dressing: a comparative study of positional accuracy and kinematic fidelity

Accurate estimation of upper-limb kinematics is essential for applications such as rehabilitation assessment and assistive robotics, yet remains challenging in real-world scenarios involving occlusion and physical human interaction. While vision-based pose estimation methods have advanced significantly, their ability to recover reliable joint kinematics under such conditions remains unclear. This paper presents a systematic comparison of vision-based and wearable sensing approaches for upper-limb pose estimation during assisted dressing tasks. A monocular RGB-based convolutional neural network (CNN) and a temporally smoothed variant (CNN_temporal) are evaluated alongside a wearable IMU-based reconstruction method. All approaches are compared against an inverse kinematics (IK) reference derived from VICON motion capture data using participant-specific kinematic models. Performance is assessed using both positional error, measured via global and shoulder-centred mean per-joint position error (MPJPE), and kinematic agreement, measured via elbow flexion/extension angle error. Experiments on a real-world dataset of assisted dressing trials, involving an occupational therapist and three participants, demonstrate that IMU-based estimation provides consistently accurate and stable joint-angle reconstruction (e.g., ∼12° mean absolute error). In contrast, vision-based methods achieve reasonable positional accuracy (MPJPE ∼0.20 m) but exhibit substantially larger errors in joint-angle estimation (often exceeding 80°), particularly under occlusion. Temporal smoothing improves positional consistency but does not preserve kinematic fidelity. These results highlight a fundamental limitation of current vision-based approaches for tasks requiring accurate joint kinematics. The findings suggest that integrating inertial sensing or incorporating biomechanical constraints may be necessary to achieve reliable pose estimation in real-world assistive scenarios.