Classification of footstep attributes using a vibration sensor

The evacuation of children and the elderly from disaster areas is sometimes difficult. This study aims to use a vibration sensor to estimate situations involving people who remain in a devastated building. This paper proposes a method to estimate the attributes of the people, such as their age or sex, based on the vibration data produced by their footsteps. The vibration data obtained through sensors are analyzed by a linear prediction method to extract the features, which are then classified using a support vector machine to estimate the attributes. The experimental results show that an accuracy of 80–95% was achieved for the classification of the sex and the type of shoes.