Improvement of measurement precision of wearable gait evaluation system used in large scale health checkup

Abstract

The measurement system of gait parameters during fastest gait using inertial sensor is proposed for large scale health checkup. During fastest gait, acceleration and angular velocity of the toe exceed the measuring range of high-sensitivity sensor. To estimate gait parameters, inertial sensor system that is composed of two triaxial accelerometer and two triaxial gyroscope with different measuring range is developed. Also, since the swing phase was manually selected in current analysis program, the burden was large. Therefore, a new algorithm for automatically determining the swing period is developed. In the health checkup, subjects are asked to walk at their fastest speed while the inertial sensor measures the acceleration and angular velocity of the toe. To evaluate the effect of the proposed method, gait parameters are estimated using the previous method and proposed one. As a result, using proposed method improves the accuracy of gait analysis compared with the previous method and shows almost same results compared with the method of manually determining the swing phase.