Three-axis digital accelerometer based wireless gait analysis with wearable System-on-Chip designs

Gait analysis is one of the ubiquitous procedures in assessing the progression of physical therapy; however, most clinical gait analyzers utilize bulk and expensive equipment and miniaturization is underway. To address this, a portable wireless gait monitoring device with a microcontroller unit was developed which can be applied at point-of-care. The system utilizes three 16G 3-axis accelerometers mounted on the leg to determine the leg's stride, angle and acceleration. Fast Fourier analysis has shown significant differences in the frequency spectrum of the different gaits. A System-On-Chip based on TSMC 0.18 um has also developed to further miniaturize the device. Such SoC consists of a low offset, and low noise analog front-end composed of chopper stabilized instrumentation amplifiers, ultra-low cut-off low pass filters, envelop/magnitude and frequency detectors.