Walking Gait Measurement and Analysis via Knee Angle Movement and Foot Plantar Pressures

Abstract

The study on human gait has gained lots of attentions for years since there are many applications including medical rehabilitation for patients having walking disorders. However, such study requires an equipment to measure the movement of body parts accurately. This work aims to build an equipment to measure, collect, visualize and analyze the knee angles and foot plantar pressures of a person who walks normally as well as of a patient who walks with some disorders. The equipment is a wearable device consisting of the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) installed on the thigh and shank for gathering angles of knee movements, the Force-Sensitive Resistor (FSR) for gathering foot pressures from plantar during a walk, the Arduino Uno units for collecting the gait data from both legs, and a NodeMCU for a controller. The collected data will be stored into a database, and the outputs are visualized via a web user interface. The statistical analysis of the walking are also displayed so that the history of walking can be used to analyze changes or tell some walking patterns of a person.