Making Gait Training Mobile - A Feasibility Analysis

As a part of a feasibility analysis, this paper reports that gait analysis of orthopedic-surgically treated patients is possible by using a Kinect v2 sensor as a low cost depth camera instead of applying a conventional marker-based multi-camera system in a gait laboratory. Being aware of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, our concept expands the potential of gait analysis from diagnostic use only toward the use for documented and actively corrective self-training of patients. The paper analyzes which gait parameters are needed for synthetic, but effective gait evaluation, and if it is possible to obtain them from the Kinect SDK skeleton in terms of exact and stable values compared to parameters obtained by a multi-camera system in a gait laboratory. The main contributions of this paper are the analysis of the usability of the Kinect v2 for mobile gait analysis.