A Smartphone-Based System for Clinical Gait Assessment

In 2010, There were more than forty million doctor visits of people with lower joints complaints, including more than one million surgeries involving total or partial hip, knee, and ankle replacement in the US. Generally, these procedures require some level of post-op physical therapy (PT), to recover most of the walking capabilities. Therefore, it is important to have a method to assess the walking capabilities of the patients in order to track their improvement over time. This paper presents a smartphone-based system to perform the Functional Gait Analysis test to assess the balance and fall risk of patients with walking difficulties. The paper addresses most of the shortcomings of current systems for the same purpose, including: 1) low cost, as it uses one off-the-shelf smartphone and the sensors embedded in it; 2) self-care, as it does not need of a specialist or physician; 3) mobile; 4) accurate, as it eliminates the ambiguities incurred by specialists; 5) information-based, as it enhances the diagnostic including other metrics that assess the gait of individual limbs and provides historical data to assess the evolution of the patient over time; and 6) easy to use and unobtrusive.