Intuitive and Interactive Movement Sonification on a Heterogeneous RISC / DSP Platform

A major requirement for effective and interactive sonification in rehabilitation is the availability of a mobile platform. Portable state of the art motion capturing is achieved with inertial sensors. This paper presents a real-time, low latency sonification demonstrator based on an low power consumption ARM Cortex A8 processor, which is designed for mobile usage. The sonification demonstrator is based on the Texas Instruments C6A816x / AM389x development board. It enables research in continuous real time sonification of human motion to improve the process of motion learning in stroke rehabilitation. Profiling results are used to benchmark the Integra software application against a PC based version in terms of signal processing latency. Furthermore, a new sonification mapping, basing on the beat effect, is introduced. This mapping is especially usable for people suffering from partial deafness. A subjective test series shows the understandability of this mapping for healthy subjects, in comparison to a previously proposed sonification mapping.