Gait rehabilitation assessment based on microwave Doppler radars embedded in walkers

Human gait is a complex motion that implies the movement of different parts of the body such as arms, legs and feet, being the functional human movements´ analysis indispensable for bio-mechanical diagnostic and treatment tool for clinics and rehabilitation services. During the rehabilitation process, walkers are frequently prescribed to improve the patient´s stability but can also be transformed into instruments for quantitative evaluation of rehabilitation progress by embedding sensors to capture the motion characteristics. In this work, a practical approach concerning the possibilities to use microwave Doppler radars embedded in four wheels walkers for gait capture is presented. The signals acquired from the sensors are processed using time-frequency transform such as STFT. A set of gait characteristics, such as gait velocity and stride rate, are extracted based on wavelet signal processing, STFT spectrogram and moving average filtering. A set of spectrogram features is calculated to discriminate between normal and abnormal gait.