Identification of Gait Events in Healthy Subjects and With Parkinson’s Disease Using Inertial Sensors: An Adaptive Unsupervised Learning Approach

Automatic identification of gait events is an essential component of the control scheme of assistive robotic devices. Many available techniques suffer limitations for real-time implementations and in guaranteeing high performances when identifying events in subjects with gait impairments. Machine learning algorithms offer a solution by enabling the training of different models to represent the gait patterns of different subjects. Here our aim is twofold: to remove the need for training stages using unsupervised learning, and to modify the parameters according to the changes within a walking trial using adaptive procedures. We developed two adaptive unsupervised algorithms for real-time detection of four gait events, using only signals from two single-IMU foot-mounted wearable devices. We evaluated the algorithms using data collected from five healthy adults and seven subjects with Parkinson's disease (PD) walking overground and on a treadmill. Both algorithms obtained high performance in terms of accuracy (F₁-score ≥ 0.95 for both groups), and timing agreement using a force-sensitive resistors as reference (mean absolute differences of 66 ± 53 msec for the healthy group, and 58 ± 63 msec for the PD group). The proposed algorithms demonstrated the potential to learn optimal parameters for a particular participant and for detecting gait events without additional sensors, external labeling, or long training stages.