Abstract
With our society rapidly aging, it is worried that the burden on families who have members in need of nursing care increase. The elderly people sometimes have come to require nursing care caused by falling. To reduce the risk of fallings in elderly, gait measurement is conducted as community health. With the conventional gait measurement system using force plate or 3-dimensional motion measuring device, it has been difficult to introduce in community health activities because of its scale and cost. Therefore, it is necessary for gait measurement system that applies in every place and low cost. In this study, a gait measurement system using laser range finder (LRF) is proposed. In the proposed system, legs of the subject are detected by the range data of LRF. Then, the system obtains the human motions in the horizontal plane and extracts the particular kinematic parameters during walking. To verify the availability of the extracted parameters, the proposed system was applied to the walking test. Test subjects walk stepping on the predesignated targets in the walking test. By applying to the test stepped correct target and extracting particular kinematic parameters, the availability of the proposed system was verified.
