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An accelerometer measures proper acceleration, which is the acceleration it experiences relative to freefall and is the acceleration felt by people and objects. [2] Put another way, at any point in spacetime the equivalence principle guarantees the existence of a local inertial frame, and an accelerometer measures the acceleration relative to that frame. [4]
Actigraphs have a number of different ways of accumulating the values from the accelerometer in memory. ZCM (zero crossing mode) counts the number of times the accelerometer waveform crosses 0 for each time period. PIM (proportional integral mode) measures the area under the curve, and adds that size for each time period.
It is thus acceleration relative to a free-fall, or inertial, observer who is momentarily at rest relative to the object being measured. Gravitation therefore does not cause proper acceleration, because the same gravity acts equally on the inertial observer. As a consequence, all inertial observers always have a proper acceleration of zero.
An accelerograph can be referred to as a strong-motion instrument or seismograph, or simply an earthquake accelerometer.They are usually constructed as a self-contained box, which previously included a paper or film recorder [1] (an analogue instrument) but now they often record directly on digital media and then the data is transmitted via the Internet.
An inertial measurement unit (IMU) is an electronic device that measures and reports a body's specific force, angular rate, and sometimes the orientation of the body, using a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and sometimes magnetometers. When the magnetometer is included, IMUs are referred to as IMMUs.
Gyroscopes measure the angular rate of rotational movement about one or more axes. Gyroscopes can measure complex motion accurately in multiple dimensions, tracking the position and rotation of a moving object unlike accelerometers which can only detect the fact that an object has moved or is moving in a particular direction.
For free bodies, the specific force is the cause of, and a measure of, the body's proper acceleration. The acceleration of an object free falling towards the earth depends on the reference frame (it disappears in the free-fall frame, also called the inertial frame), but any g-force "acceleration" will be present in all frames.
Gravity is usually measured in units of acceleration.In the SI system of units, the standard unit of acceleration is metres per second squared (m/s 2).Other units include the cgs gal (sometimes known as a galileo, in either case with symbol Gal), which equals 1 centimetre per second squared, and the g (g n), equal to 9.80665 m/s 2.