BACKGROUND: Analysis of gait parameters is an essential component of diagnosing musculoskeletal/neuromuscular conditions. A standard approach to gait analysis involves sophisticated commercially ...available digital technologies, which are expensive and not affordable by under-resourced tertiary care hospitals. We aimed here to test the validity of a low-cost digital tool for gait analysis in a tertiary care hospital setting. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study used a smartphone with a 12-megapixel camera mounted on a tripod with Kinovea software (version 0.9.5, Free Software Foundation, Inc., Boston, MA, USA, distributed under a GPL v2 license) for gait analysis in our tertiary care hospital. This novel indigenous tool was validated in 502 healthy individuals by comparing standard gait parameters evaluated between younger and healthy cohorts. RESULTS: Overall, the recording and analysis process was simple, quick, and easy to use. The validity of our novel indigenous gait analysis tool was established by observation of reduced stride length, foot clearance, and knee goniometry among elderly subjects compared to the younger cohorts. Our observation of the elderly subjects showing altered gait parameters compared to the younger age group was consistent with previous studies measuring the same parameters using commercially available standard gait analysis tools. CONCLUSION: The novel indigenous approach validated in this study offers a low-cost and effective tool for routine gait analysis in any under-resourced tertiary or primary care hospital setting.
In recent years, many technologies for gait and posture assessments have emerged. Wearable sensors, active and passive in-house monitors, and many combinations thereof all promise to provide accurate ...measures of physical activity, gait, and posture parameters. Motivated by market projections for wearable technologies and driven by recent technological innovations in wearable sensors (MEMs, electronic textiles, wireless communications, etc.), wearable health/performance research is growing rapidly and has the potential to transform future healthcare from disease treatment to disease prevention. The objective of this Special Issue is to address and disseminate the latest gait, posture, and activity monitoring systems as well as various mathematical models/methods that characterize mobility functions. This Special Issue focuses on wearable monitoring systems and physical sensors, and its mathematical models can be utilized in varied environments under varied conditions to monitor health and performance
In recent years, many technologies for gait and posture assessments have emerged. Wearable sensors, active and passive in-house monitors, and many combinations thereof all promise to provide accurate ...measures of physical activity, gait, and posture parameters. Motivated by market projections for wearable technologies and driven by recent technological innovations in wearable sensors (MEMs, electronic textiles, wireless communications, etc.), wearable health/performance research is growing rapidly and has the potential to transform future healthcare from disease treatment to disease prevention. The objective of this Special Issue is to address and disseminate the latest gait, posture, and activity monitoring systems as well as various mathematical models/methods that characterize mobility functions. This Special Issue focuses on wearable monitoring systems and physical sensors, and its mathematical models can be utilized in varied environments under varied conditions to monitor health and performance
After decades of evolution, measuring instruments for quantitative gait analysis have become an important clinical tool for assessing pathologies manifested by gait abnormalities. However, such ...instruments tend to be expensive and require expert operation and maintenance besides their high cost, thus limiting them to only a small number of specialized centers. Consequently, gait analysis in most clinics today still relies on observation-based assessment. Recent advances in wearable sensors, especially inertial body sensors, have opened up a promising future for gait analysis. Not only can these sensors be more easily adopted in clinical diagnosis and treatment procedures than their current counterparts, but they can also monitor gait continuously outside clinics - hence providing seamless patient analysis from clinics to free-living environments. The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of current techniques for quantitative gait analysis and to propose key metrics for evaluating both existing and emerging methods for qualifying the gait features extracted from wearable sensors. It aims to highlight key advances in this rapidly evolving research field and outline potential future directions for both research and clinical applications.
Objective: In this paper, we demonstrate the applicability of radar for gait classification with application to home security, medical diagnosis, rehabilitation, and assisted living. Aiming at ...identifying changes in gait patterns based on radar micro-Doppler signatures, this paper is concerned with solving the intra motion category classification problem of gait recognition. Methods: New gait classification approaches utilizing physical features, subspace features, and sum-of-harmonics modeling are presented and their performances are evaluated using experimental K-band radar data of four test subjects. Five different gait classes are considered for each person, including normal, pathological, and assisted walks. Results: The proposed approaches are shown to outperform existing methods for radar-based gait recognition, which utilize physical features from the cadence-velocity data representation domain as in this paper. The analyzed gait classes are correctly identified with an average accuracy of 93.8%, where a classification rate of 98.5% is achieved for a single gait class. When applied to new data of another individual, a classification accuracy on the order of 80% can be expected. Conclusion: Radar micro-Doppler signatures and their Fourier transforms are well suited to capture changes in gait. Five different walking styles are recognized with high accuracy. Significance: Radar-based sensing of gait is an emerging technology with multi-faceted applications in security and health care industries. We show that radar, as a contact-less sensing technology, can supplement existing gait diagnostic tools with respect to long-term monitoring and reproducibility of the examinations.
With the recent development of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), inertial sensors have become widely used in the research of wearable gait analysis due to several factors, such as being ...easy-to-use and low-cost. Considering the fact that each individual has a unique way of walking, inertial sensors can be applied to the problem of gait recognition where assessed gait can be interpreted as a biometric trait. Thus, inertial sensor-based gait recognition has a great potential to play an important role in many security-related applications. Since inertial sensors are included in smart devices that are nowadays present at every step, inertial sensor-based gait recognition has become very attractive and emerging field of research that has provided many interesting discoveries recently. This paper provides a thorough and systematic review of current state-of-the-art in this field of research. Review procedure has revealed that the latest advanced inertial sensor-based gait recognition approaches are able to sufficiently recognise the users when relying on inertial data obtained during gait by single commercially available smart device in controlled circumstances, including fixed placement and small variations in gait. Furthermore, these approaches have also revealed considerable breakthrough by realistic use in uncontrolled circumstances, showing great potential for their further development and wide applicability.
Gait analysis has traditionally been carried out in a laboratory environment using expensive equipment, but, recently, reliable, affordable, and wearable sensors have enabled integration into ...clinical applications as well as use during activities of daily living. Real-time gait analysis is key to the development of gait rehabilitation techniques and assistive devices such as neuroprostheses. This article presents a systematic review of wearable sensors and techniques used in real-time gait analysis, and their application to pathological gait. From four major scientific databases, we identified 1262 articles of which 113 were analyzed in full-text. We found that heel strike and toe off are the most sought-after gait events. Inertial measurement units (IMU) are the most widely used wearable sensors and the shank and foot are the preferred placements. Insole pressure sensors are the most common sensors for ground-truth validation for IMU-based gait detection. Rule-based techniques relying on threshold or peak detection are the most widely used gait detection method. The heterogeneity of evaluation criteria prevented quantitative performance comparison of all methods. Although most studies predicted that the proposed methods would work on pathological gait, less than one third were validated on such data. Clinical applications of gait detection algorithms were considered, and we recommend a combination of IMU and rule-based methods as an optimal solution.
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