Deep Neural Network-Based Gait Classification Using Wearable Inertial Sensor Data

Human gait has been regarded as a useful behavioral biometric trait for personal identification and authentication. This study aimed to propose an effective approach for classifying gait, measured using wearable inertial sensors, based on neural networks. The 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope data were acquired at the posterior pelvis, both thighs, both shanks, and both feet while 29 semi-professional athletes, 19 participants with normal foot, and 21 patients with foot deformities walked on the 20-meter straight path. The classifier based on the gait parameters and fully connected neural network was developed by applying 4-fold cross-validation to 80% of the total samples. For the test set that consisted of the remaining 20% of the total samples, this classifier showed an accuracy of 93.02% in categorizing the athlete, normal foot, and deformed foot groups. Using the same model validation and evaluation method, up to 98.19% accuracy was achieved from the convolutional neural network-based classifier. This classifier was trained with the gait spectrograms obtained from the time-frequency domain analysis of the raw acceleration and angular velocity data. The classification based only on the pelvic spectrograms exhibited an accuracy of 94.25% even without requiring a time-consuming and resource-intensive process for feature engineering. The notable performance and practicality in gait classification achieved by this study suggest potential applicability of the proposed approaches in the field of biometrics.