Accelerometry Based Classification of Walking Patterns Using Time-frequency Analysis

In this work, 33 dimensional time-frequency domain features were developed and evaluated to detect five different human walking patterns from data acquired using a triaxial accelerometer attached at the waist above the iliac spine. 52 subjects were asked to walk on a flat surface along a corridor, walk up and down a flight of a stairway and walk up and down a constant gradient slope, in an unsupervised manner. Time-frequency domain features of acceleration data in anterior-posterior (AP), medio-lateral (ML) and vertical (VT) direction were developed. The acceleration signal in each direction was decomposed to six detailed signals at different wavelet scales by using the wavelet packet transform. The rms values and standard deviations of the decomposed signals at scales 5 to 2 corresponding to the 0.78-18.75 Hz frequency band were calculated. The energies in the 0.39-18.75 Hz frequency band of acceleration signal in AP, ML and VT directions were also computed. The back-end of the system was a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) Neural Networks (NNs) classifier. Overall classification accuracies of 88.54% and 92.05% were achieved by using a round robin (RR) and random frame selecting (RFS) train-test method respectively for the five walking patterns.