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This paper presents a wearable inertial measurement system and its associated spatiotemporal gait analysis algorithm to obtain quantitative measurements and explore clinical indicators from the spatiotemporal gait patterns for patients with stroke or Parkinson's disease. The wearable system is composed of a microcontroller, a triaxial accelerometer, a triaxial gyroscope, and an RF wireless transmission module. The spatiotemporal gait analysis algorithm, consisting of procedures of inertial signal acquisition, signal preprocessing, gait phase detection, and ankle range of motion estimation, has been developed for extracting gait features from accelerations and angular velocities. In order to estimate accurate ankle range of motion, we have integrated accelerations and angular velocities into a complementary filter for reducing the accumulation of integration error of inertial signals. All 24 participants mounted the system on their foot to walk along a straight line of 10 m at normal speed and their walking recordings were collected to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system and algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed inertial measurement system with the designed spatiotemporal gait analysis algorithm is a promising tool for automatically analyzing spatiotemporal gait information, serving as clinical indicators for monitoring therapeutic efficacy for diagnosis of stroke or Parkinson's disease.
Chang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.