Measurement and extraction of base-of-support gait parameter using a novel accurate human locomotiontracking system via UWB radios

In this paper, we use our recently proposed highly accurate gait analysis system presented in [1] to measure the base-of-support (BOS) gait parameter, which is defined as the distance from heel-to-heel while walking. This particular gait parameter is known to be of clinical importance, and its measurement accuracy reported in the literature using current highly accurate optical tracking systems is not sufficiently accurate to be clinically accepted. We further develop a simulation environment using MATLAB to extract gait parameters from the raw-marker-data measured using sophisticated optical tracking systems, which commonly require dedicated and highly sophisticated software programs. Then, we compare the accuracy of the measured BOS using our proposed system to the extracted BOS from optical tracking systems. We show that our proposed system outperforms the corresponding highly accurate optical tracking systems. In particular, we show that our system provides an accuracy of 1.2% for the BOS measurement compared to 14.6% accuracy for current optical tracking systems.