Gait Analysis Using a Shoe-Integrated Wireless Sensor System

Abstract

Abstract-We describe a wireless wearable system that was developed to provide quantitative gait analysis outside the confines of the traditional motion laboratory. The sensor suite includes three orthogonal accelerometers, three orthogonal gyroscopes, four force sensors, two bidirectional bend sensors, two dynamic pressure sensors, as well as electric field height sensors. The "GaitShoe" was built to be worn in any shoe, without interfering with gait and was designed to collect data unobtrusively, in any environment, and over long periods. The calibrated sensor outputs were analyzed and validated with results obtained simultaneously from the Massachusetts General Hospital, Biomotion Laboratory. The GaitShoe proved highly capable of detecting heel-strike and toe-off, as well as estimating foot orientation and position, inter alia.Index Terms-Biomedical measurements, body sensor networks, legged locomotion, multisensor systems, telemetry.

Sensing Workers Gait Abnormality for Safety Hazard Identification

“…Given the need for an ambulatory gait-monitoring system, some studies used WIMU sensors in gait analysis for fall-accident prevention and evaluated these sensors' performance [17,18]. Using the kinematic data captured via WIMUs, researchers computed spatiotemporal gait features (e.g., stride time and stride distance) to assess abrupt changes in patients' gait patterns and to measure the risk of falls [20,22,23]. While such gait analysis has been used for patients, there are no previous attempts to use it for identifying hazards in construction environments.…”

“…This study used the zero-velocity assumption and zero-velocity update (ZUPT) to compensate for drift errors in gaitfeature computations. Previous studies [22,28,30] have widely used the zero-velocity assumption to offset sensor measurement errors and drifts; this assumption says that the velocity of the foot is zero when the foot is located horizontally on the ground, which is why this location (the ground) is also known as the zero-velocity point. The zero-velocity update (ZUPT) method compensates for drift errors in velocity computations by updating a zero value for each zero-velocity points during a gait.…”

A Validation Test of Measurement Method of Lower Limb Angles Based on Kalman Filter on Different Type of Inertial Sensors

“…From these results, the movement acceleration is considered to be the cause of the error increase as target angle range increases. In this paper, parameter value to determine the gain of the Kalman filter was fixed for all sensors ( 5 10 under the static condition, and 7 10 under the dynamic condition) in analyzing the measurement data. Basically, it is better to correct measured angles with gyroscope more strongly by acceleration signal under the static condition than those under the dynamic condition in the Kalman filtering based method.…”

Qualitative Risk of Falling Assessment Based on Gait Abnormalities

“…Typically, those shoes uses sensors embedded in the sole to analyse the user gait. For instance, shoes with wireless capabilities have demonstrated the feasibility of computing walking parameters such as heelstrike, toe-off, foot orientation and position [5]. Also in [15], they computed an instability assessment model for health care professionals with the help of eight gait parameters, such as pressure correlation, step time, cadence and stance-to-swing ratio.…”

“…The result computed by (4) gives an indicator G at time t of the gait abnormalities. The global indicator G is obtained by summing those timed indicators according to (5). Finally, the third stage discretizes the risk by applying thresholds to the global indicator.…”