Gait analysis using wearable sensors

Abstract

Gait analysis is currently the most widely used technique for analyzing the walking pattern of patients and detecting the problems. Besides analysing the gait cycle of human being, another important application is to check the reliability and compatibility of prosthetic legs (check the flexion and extension of prosthetic legs). It is used for detecting the different problems related to posture and movement in physiotherapy science. The main aim of our research was to make this technique easily available to everyone at low cost while maintaining the reliability and efficiency. The technique which we followed focused on measuring the different gait parameters (i.e. angle of different joints) by using gyro sensors. We mounted 3 gyro sensors at different joint positions of leg (ankle, knee and hip) and took readings from those gyro sensors using I2C communication protocol. We used MSP430F5257 as our central processor. After testing different samples and analysing the data available we found our sensor reliable and quite accurate. This strongly supports the use of our Gyro based system for analyzing Gait cycle for medical usage.