Gait analysis using kinect: Towards in-home gait analysis

Gait analysis helps people understand if they have any abnormalities in walking or helps clinicians assess fall-risk and determine how person's gait is different from previous assessments to understand the effect of medicine or disease progression. Gait analysis conducted in a laboratory environment is expensive and obtrusive that it is not suitable for daily use and therefore we can not get information about gait parameters on daily basis. Considering that one of the fundamental activities in our daily lives is walking, it is important to quantify gait parameters on daily basis with accurate and unobtrusive systems. In this paper, a continuous, unobtrusive, in-home gait measurement system is studied using Kinect. This system enables people to measure gait parameters without any need to go to gait analysis laboratories. We collected Kinect data from 21 subjects, 15 of whom have healthy gait whereas 6 of whom have movement disorders with different neurological conditions. Gait parameters of stride length, standard deviation of stride length and cadence are extracted.