Abstract
Many commercially available pedometers based on an accelerometer do not deal with ultra-low speed walking or irregular walking that are seen in the elderly. In this study, we attempted to evaluate usefulness of a gyroscope for walking at ultra-low speed. Four healthy young subjects wore the sensor to front-left of waist and walked on a treadmill at 0.5 - 4.0 km/h. The relative yaw angle calculated by the gyroscope output showed a pattern which is able to confirm each step at even low speed of 1.0km/h. The average error rates of step counts at 1.0 and 1.5km/h were 5.9% and 2.4%, respectively. For walking at more than 2.0km/h, the average error rates were less than 1.0%.
