A trial of making reference gait data for simple gait evaluation system with wireless inertial sensors

Recently, the use of wearable inertial sensors have been widely studied in the field of human movement analysis. Our research group developed a wearable motion measurement system using the wireless inertial sensors for rehabilitation training and daily exercise. However, there are few reference data to evaluate motor function. In this paper, reference data of joint and inclination angles of lower limb and that of gait event timing for gait evaluation were made by measurement with 4 healthy subjects in their twenties. Average values of inclination and joint angles and gait event timings were similar to those seen in literature. These suggest that the averaged data obtained in this paper can be used as reference data. Then, gait data of a healthy subject in his thirties were compared with the reference data. Most of angles and all the gait event timings were considered to be standard of 20's. However, some angles of the healthy subject in his thirties were considered not to be the standard partly. These differences in evaluation were considered to depend on a level of similarity of movement to the reference data. It was expected to evaluate the level of similarity of movement from various parameters.