Kinematic Analysis of Human Gait Based on Wearable Sensor System for Gait Rehabilitation

Quantitative analysis of gait phases is needed for gait rehabilitation. This study proposes a wireless wearable system for real-time monitoring of plantar pressure distribution and acceleration information during walking. The goal of this paper is to investigate the potential use of the support vector machine technique with force-sensitive resistor and acceleration values to detect phases in the cyclic motion of the human dynamic gait. The device consists of a flexible insole with seven force-sensitive elements and a triaxial accelerometer that is integrated with an electronic board for high-frequency data acquisition, pre-filtering, and wireless transmission to a remote data computation and storage unit. The design and development of the device are presented, along with its experimental characterization and validation when applied to healthy participants and those diagnosed with osteoarthritis walking at various speeds, and benchmarked against an instrumented force platform. The experimental results verify that the proposed method is valid, with an accuracy of as high as 94.08%.