Assessment of Inertial Measurement Units for Estimating Kinematic Data in Gait Analysis

Accurate measurement of human joint angles during gait is crucial for understanding movement biomechanics and assessing musculoskeletal conditions. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) have become popular for capturing joint kinematics due to their portability, affordability, and ease of use. In this paper, a system with four IMU sensors was designed and tested to compare joint angles obtained from IMUs with those from a 3D motion capture system. The experiments showed that an excellent correlation (r = 0.9) in hip and knee joint angles, outperforming the state-of-the-art systems.