Hammering Away with a Dual-Mode IMU

Accelerometer inertial measurement units (IMUs) are useful in tracking movement, but they tend to have a limited range. This can be a challenge for designers trying to deal with applications that have a very wide measurement range. One way to address it is with multiple sensors that operate at different points along this range, as is the case with STMicroelectronics’ LSM6DSV320X.

In the video above, Ernesto Manuel Cantone, Senior Product Marketing Manager, shows why a dual-mode system can tackle measurements up to 320 g. It can be used for applications like fall/drop emergencies, concussion monitoring, and intense movement tracking.

The LSM6DSV320X is a 6-axis IMU with dual accelerometers and 3-axis gyroscope. The low-g accelerometer handles up to 16 g while the high-g accelerometer handles up to 320 g. It incorporates a finite state machine (FSM) for configurable motion tracking along with a machine learning core (MLC) for real-time analysis (see figure).

Those can be combined with ST’s sensor-fusion low-power (SFLP) technology to provide spatial orientation support as well as detect specific motion patterns or signals from the MLC without host processor management. The chip’s adaptive self-configuration (ASC) is designed to optimize power consumption.

The LSM6DSV320X supports up to eight independent decision trees, with each tree generating up to 16 results. This information is available to the host processor.