Measurement of foot placement and its variability with inertial sensors.

ABSTRACT: Gait parameters such as stride length, width, and period, as well as their respective variabilities, are widely used as indicators of mobility and walking function. Foot placement and its variability have thus been applied in areas such as aging, fall risk, spinal cord injury, diabetic neuropathy, and neurological conditions. But a drawback is that these measures are presently best obtained with specialized laboratory equipment such as motion capture systems and instrumented walkways, which may not be available in many clinics and certainly not during daily activities. One alternative is to fix inertial measurement units (IMUs) to the feet or body to gather motion data. However, few existing methods measure foot placement directly, due to drift associated with inertial data. We developed a

SUBMITTER: Rebula JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4284057 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature