AUTOMATIC AND COMPREHENSIVE GAIT MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS

Abstract

Gait analysis is the measurement of quantities related to human locomotion. Some quantities of clinical interest such as step width are difficult to estimate using wearable sensors. We introduce a custom foot-mounted wearable gait analysis device based on Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and Ultra Wideband (UWB) ranging technology. Our system is wireless, inexpensive, portable, and able to estimate important clinical measurements such as step width. We collect a dataset of over two-thousand steps across twenty-one healthy young people using our system and a clinical gold-standard walking mat concurrently. We then detail a baseline method for estimating important clinical gait metrics from normal walking using only UWB, only IMU, and a fusion of the two sensors. We test our system and algorithms using an asymmetric walking dataset, containing five different types of walks and compare against our ground truth measurements and IMU-only methods.