Inertial sensing for gait analysis and the scope for sensor fusion

Conventional gait analysis systems make use of cameras and are therefore bounded to a restricted area. In this work, we focus on developing a low-cost, wearable gait analysis system based on inertial sensors, as a suitable ambulatory alternative to be used in unconstrained locations. The developed system is tailored to study lower body motion in terms of gait parameters and joint kinematics. The main focus is in using the inertial sensors data, e.g. joint acceleration and quaternion rotation readings, for the reconstruction of visually appealing motion sequences from low-dimensional sensor input. This requires inertial sensor data to be mapped and fused with optical motion capture data. For this purpose, we propose to use a hierarchical skeleton model obtained from an optical motion capture database.