Two Shank-Mounted IMUs-Based Gait Analysis and Classification for Neurological Disease Patients

Automatic gait measurement and analysis is an enabling tool for intelligent healthcare and robotics-assisted rehabilitation. This letter proposes a novel two shank-mounted inertial measurement units (IMU)-based method on gait analysis and classification for three different neurological diseases. The IMU-based gait analysis and design aims to be applied in personal daily activities and environment for remote diagnosis and rehabilitation guidance. In the design, eight spatial-temporal and kinematic gait parameters are extracted from two shank-mounted IMUs. A support vector machine-based classifier is developed to classify four types of gait patterns with different neurological diseases (healthy control, peripheral neuropathy, post-stroke and Parkinson's disease). A total of 49 subjects are recruited and 93.9% of them are assigned to the right group after the leave-one-subject-out cross validation. The results demonstrate that the proposed IMU-based gait parameters and classifier are capable of differentiating the four types of gait patterns. The analysis and design have great potentials for use in clinical applications.