scholarly journals Inertial Sensor-Based Two Feet Motion Tracking for Gait Analysis

Sensors ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 5614-5629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tran Hung ◽  
Young Suh
2011 ◽  
Vol 145 ◽  
pp. 567-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Je Nam Kim ◽  
Mun Ho Ryu ◽  
Yoon Seok Yang ◽  
Seong Hyun Kim

Walking is one of the basic human activities. Several well-defined, motion tracking systems have been used for gait analysis. However, these systems such as the optical motion tracking system are very expensive and limited to laboratory usage. Recently, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based inertial sensors have made it possible to overcome these disadvantages. The aim of this study was to identify gait events and the supporting leg by measuring the mediolateral swing angle. An inertial sensor unit with a 3-axis accelerometer and 2-axis gyroscope was attached to the subject’s lower trunk using an elastic band. Five, healthy and young (20–29 yrs.) subjects participated in this experiment. Each walked twice along a straight, 25-m path at three different speeds. During each trial, the sensor transmitted signals to a PC via Bluetooth technology. In this study, gait events and the supporting leg were identified using the peak and sign of the mediolateral swing angle. The mediolateral swing angle was calculated using the integrated gyroscope signal. For comparison, a well-defined spatiotemporal gait analysis technique was also applied. In this reference method, the gait event was identified with the last peak of the vertical acceleration before the sign change from positive to negative. The supporting leg was identified using the sign of the mediolateral acceleration double integration. Identification of the supporting leg was difficult in the reference method because of the offset and gravity components in the mediolateral acceleration. However, the proposed method reported here, showed stable identification of gait events and the supporting leg. This study could be expanded to more detailed gait analysis with the additional fusion of a 3-axis acceleration, gyroscope and magnetometer.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 15990-15997
Author(s):  
Felix Laufer ◽  
Michael Lorenz ◽  
Bertram Taetz ◽  
Gabriele Bleser

Author(s):  
Gunjan Patel ◽  
Rajani Mullerpatan ◽  
Bela Agarwal ◽  
Triveni Shetty ◽  
Rajdeep Ojha ◽  
...  

Wearable inertial sensor-based motion analysis systems are promising alternatives to standard camera-based motion capture systems for the measurement of gait parameters and joint kinematics. These wearable sensors, unlike camera-based gold standard systems, find usefulness in outdoor natural environment along with confined indoor laboratory-based environment due to miniature size and wireless data transmission. This study reports validation of our developed (i-Sens) wearable motion analysis system against standard motion capture system. Gait analysis was performed at self-selected speed on non-disabled volunteers in indoor ( n = 15) and outdoor ( n = 8) environments. Two i-Sens units were placed at the level of knee and hip along with passive markers (for indoor study only) for simultaneous 3D motion capture using a motion capture system. Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was computed for spatiotemporal parameters from the i-Sens system versus the motion capture system as a true reference. Mean and standard deviation of kinematic data for a gait cycle were plotted for both systems against normative data. Joint kinematics data were analyzed to compute the root mean squared error (RMSE) and Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Kinematic plots indicate a high degree of accuracy of the i-Sens system with the reference system. Excellent positive correlation was observed between the two systems in terms of hip and knee joint angles (Indoor: hip 3.98° ± 1.03°, knee 6.48° ± 1.91°, Outdoor: hip 3.94° ± 0.78°, knee 5.82° ± 0.99°) with low RMSE. Reliability characteristics (defined using standard statistical thresholds of MAPE) of stride length, cadence, walking speed in both outdoor and indoor environment were well within the “Good” category. The i-Sens system has emerged as a potentially cost-effective, valid, accurate, and reliable alternative to expensive, standard motion capture systems for gait analysis. Further clinical trials using the i-Sens system are warranted on participants across different age groups.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne Passon ◽  
Thomas Schauer ◽  
Thomas Seel

End-effector-based robotic systems provide easy-to-set-up motion support in rehabilitation of stroke and spinal-cord-injured patients. However, measurement information is obtained only about the motion of the limb segments to which the systems are attached and not about the adjacent limb segments. We demonstrate in one particular experimental setup that this limitation can be overcome by augmenting an end-effector-based robot with a wearable inertial sensor. Most existing inertial motion tracking approaches rely on a homogeneous magnetic field and thus fail in indoor environments and near ferromagnetic materials and electronic devices. In contrast, we propose a magnetometer-free sensor fusion method. It uses a quaternion-based algorithm to track the heading of a limb segment in real time by combining the gyroscope and accelerometer readings with position measurements of one point along that segment. We apply this method to an upper-limb rehabilitation robotics use case in which the orientation and position of the forearm and elbow are known, and the orientation and position of the upper arm and shoulder are estimated by the proposed method using an inertial sensor worn on the upper arm. Experimental data from five healthy subjects who performed 282 proper executions of a typical rehabilitation motion and 163 executions with compensation motion are evaluated. Using a camera-based system as a ground truth, we demonstrate that the shoulder position and the elbow angle are tracked with median errors around 4 cm and 4°, respectively; and that undesirable compensatory shoulder movements, which were defined as shoulder displacements greater ±10 cm for more than 20% of a motion cycle, are detected and classified 100% correctly across all 445 performed motions. The results indicate that wearable inertial sensors and end-effector-based robots can be combined to provide means for effective rehabilitation therapy with likewise detailed and accurate motion tracking for performance assessment, real-time biofeedback and feedback control of robotic and neuroprosthetic motion support.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (19) ◽  
pp. 6559
Author(s):  
Nils Roth ◽  
Arne Küderle ◽  
Dominik Prossel ◽  
Heiko Gassner ◽  
Bjoern M. Eskofier ◽  
...  

Climbing stairs is a fundamental part of daily life, adding additional demands on the postural control system compared to level walking. Although real-world gait analysis studies likely contain stair ambulation sequences, algorithms dedicated to the analysis of such activities are still missing. Therefore, we propose a new gait analysis pipeline for foot-worn inertial sensors, which can segment, parametrize, and classify strides from continuous gait sequences that include level walking, stair ascending, and stair descending. For segmentation, an existing approach based on the hidden Markov model and a feature-based gait event detection were extended, reaching an average segmentation F1 score of 98.5% and gait event timing errors below ±10ms for all conditions. Stride types were classified with an accuracy of 98.2% using spatial features derived from a Kalman filter-based trajectory reconstruction. The evaluation was performed on a dataset of 20 healthy participants walking on three different staircases at different speeds. The entire pipeline was additionally validated end-to-end on an independent dataset of 13 Parkinson’s disease patients. The presented work aims to extend real-world gait analysis by including stair ambulation parameters in order to gain new insights into mobility impairments that can be linked to clinically relevant conditions such as a patient’s fall risk and disease state or progression.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (18) ◽  
pp. 5104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Amadeus Albert ◽  
Victor Owolabi ◽  
Arnd Gebel ◽  
Clemens Markus Brahms ◽  
Urs Granacher ◽  
...  

Gait analysis is an important tool for the early detection of neurological diseases and for the assessment of risk of falling in elderly people. The availability of low-cost camera hardware on the market today and recent advances in Machine Learning enable a wide range of clinical and health-related applications, such as patient monitoring or exercise recognition at home. In this study, we evaluated the motion tracking performance of the latest generation of the Microsoft Kinect camera, Azure Kinect, compared to its predecessor Kinect v2 in terms of treadmill walking using a gold standard Vicon multi-camera motion capturing system and the 39 marker Plug-in Gait model. Five young and healthy subjects walked on a treadmill at three different velocities while data were recorded simultaneously with all three camera systems. An easy-to-administer camera calibration method developed here was used to spatially align the 3D skeleton data from both Kinect cameras and the Vicon system. With this calibration, the spatial agreement of joint positions between the two Kinect cameras and the reference system was evaluated. In addition, we compared the accuracy of certain spatio-temporal gait parameters, i.e., step length, step time, step width, and stride time calculated from the Kinect data, with the gold standard system. Our results showed that the improved hardware and the motion tracking algorithm of the Azure Kinect camera led to a significantly higher accuracy of the spatial gait parameters than the predecessor Kinect v2, while no significant differences were found between the temporal parameters. Furthermore, we explain in detail how this experimental setup could be used to continuously monitor the progress during gait rehabilitation in older people.


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