A Low Cost Alternative to Monitor Human Gait Temporal Parameters–Wearable Wireless Gyroscope

Gait events and temporal parameters are presently identified by requiring both patient and healthcare professional to be present at a gait laboratory. This requirement is not feasible for the general population in developing countries, where access to such laboratories is limited and costly. Therefore, an inexpensive gait monitoring device has great potential to address this limitation. This paper presents the development of a low cost wearable wireless device that relies on gyroscopic data to: 1) identify gait events, that is, heel-strike (HS) and toe-off (TO), and 2) determine gait temporal parameters. This wearable device is to be worn around the human foot and ankle. It relies on heuristics and zero-crossing method to detect HS and TO accurately. In the experimental study, the identified gait events were benchmarked against force plate. The average errors were found to be between −20.45 and −17.33 ms for HS and −25.21 and −8.97 ms for TO. The R
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and Bland Altman plot showed positive and consistent results. These findings demonstrated the viability of the proposed system in identifying gait events and determining gait temporal parameters.