Predicting Individualized Joint Kinematics Over Continuous Variations of Walking, Running, and Stair Climbing

Goal:
Accounting for gait individuality is important to positive outcomes with wearable robots, but manually tuning multi-activity models is time-consuming and not viable in a clinic. Generalizations can possibly be made to predict gait individuality in unobserved conditions.
Methods:
Kinematic individuality—how one person's joint angles differ from the group—is quantified for every subject, joint, ambulation mode (walking, running, stair ascent, and stair descent), and intramodal task (speed, incline) in an open-access dataset with 10 able-bodied subjects. Four N-way ANOVAs test how prediction methods affect the fit to experimental data between and within ambulation modes. We test whether walking individuality (measured at a single speed on level ground) carries across modes, or whether a mode-specific prediction (based on a single task for each mode) is significantly more effective.
Results:
Kinematic individualization improves fit across joint and task if we consider each mode separately. Across all modes, tasks, and joints, modal individualization improved the fit in 81% of trials, improving the fit on average by 4.3
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across the gait cycle. This was statistically significant at all joints for walking and running, and half the joints for stair ascent/descent.
Conclusions:
For walking and running, kinematic individuality can be easily generalized within mode, but the trends are mixed on stairs depending on joint.