GaitWEAR: An Augmented Wearable System for Gait Quantification

Often, one's gait needs to be quantified to evaluate functional status and overall health. Given the difficulties associated with observation-based methods, researchers have been using technology-assisted systems, e.g., motion capture and pressure-mat systems. Despite offering high accuracy, these systems entail high cost, reduced portability, and confinement to controlled settings. To overcome such challenges, wearable solutions are being explored. Specifically, currently existing systems with only inertial measurement units (IMUs) have been used to quantify gait. Alternately, researchers have used instrumented shoes with insoles impregnated with varying force sensors to quantify one's gait. This offers a direct measure of temporal parameters of gait, while spatial and spatiotemporal parameters of gait are derived from the temporal measures and information on the pathway being traversed. Augmenting instrumented shoes with IMUs can offer an avenue to get a direct measure of the spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal parameters of gait. Motivated by this alternate approach, we present an integrated system (GaitWEAR) comprising of instrumented shoes and IMUs. Subsequently, we evaluated the performance of GaitWEAR and that of the currently existing system having only IMUs (only IMU-based system) while comparing their performances (in terms of gait parameters) with state-of-the-art pressure-mat-based system. Results of our evaluation study involving 32 participants (healthy young, elderly with and without gait abnormality) suggest that GaitWEAR demonstrated superior performance through improved agreement with the state-of-the-art system (irrespective of age and gait health) and better clinical relevance than the only IMU-based system, particularly in the case of gait abnormality.