Use of an ultra-miniaturized IMU-based motion capture system for objective evaluation and assessment of walking skills

The increasing age of the world population is posing new challenges to our society, such as how to keep this aging population healthy and active despite of the age. In recent years, there has been a lot of interest for gait analysis for rehabilitation purposes as well as for performance assessment of this aging population. While current systems work well, they still have several limitations. Cost, need for specialized personnel, need to be used in a research center, and sporadic measurement prevent these systems from being widely used. The authors propose the use of extremely miniaturized, portable measurement systems, which can be worn by the users during their everyday life, and can monitor their gait over a long timespan. This paper presents the preliminary experiments with such a system.