Human motion tracking and gait analysis: a brief review of current sensing systems and integration with intelligent environments

Human motion tracking and gait analysis is becoming a topic of great interest in everyday applications generating a large amount of research into systems that can provide this information in real time at a low cost and with the smallest intrusion level possible. In this line different approaches have been proposed following distinct philosophies usually related to the final application of the system. This paper is aimed on one hand at providing a review of non vision based current systems highlighting how distinct and oriented towards particular applications they are. On the other this paper deals with the problem of integrating such different elements into efficient environmental intelligence applications that can be used as a base for home rehabilitation or automatic elderly assistance. This is addressed by implementing a specific device access layer within a novel distributed agent based ambient intelligence architecture called HI³.