Wrist-to-Tibia/Shoe Inertial Measurement Results Translation Using Neural Networks

Abstract

Most of the established gait evaluation methods use inertial sensors mounted in the lower limb area (tibias, ankles, shoes). Such sensor placement gives good results in laboratory conditions but is hard to apply in everyday scenarios due to the sensors’ fragility and the user’s comfort. The paper presents an algorithm that enables translation of the inertial signal measurements (acceleration and angular velocity) registered with a wrist-worn sensor to signals, which would be obtained if the sensor was worn on a tibia or a shoe. Four different neural network architectures are considered for that purpose: Dense and CNN autoencoders, a CNN-LSTM hybrid, and a U-Net-based model. The performed experiments have shown that the CNN autoencoder and U-Net can be successfully applied for inertial signal translation purposes. Estimating gait parameters based on the translated signals yielded similar results to those obtained based on shoe-sensor signals.