Toward robust and platform-agnostic gait analysis

Biometric gait analysis using wearable sensors offers an objective and quantitative method for gait parameter extraction. However, current techniques are constrained to specific platform parameters, and hence significantly lack generality, scalability and sustainability. In this paper, we propose a platform-independent and self-adaptive approach for gait cycle detection and cadence estimation. Our algorithm utilizes physical kinematic properties and cyclic patterns of foot acceleration signals to automatically adjust internal parameters of the algorithm. As a result, the proposed approach is robust to noise and changes in sensor platform parameters such as sampling rate and sensor resolution. For the evaluation purpose, we use acceleration signals collected from 16 subjects in a clinical setting to examine the accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm. The results show that our approach achieves a precision above 98% and a recall above 95% in stride detection, and an average accuracy of 98% in cadence estimation under various uncertainty conditions such as noisy signals and changes in sampling frequency and sensor resolution.