Reliability and validity of Smartphones to Record and Study the Assessment of Gait Characteristics

Studying the assessment of spatiotemporal parameters is an important clinical indicator of the procedure of assessment tools requires a laboratory environment and a highly qualified expert. This process of assessment takes a long time, is error-prone, very expensive and time-consuming. In this study, an efficient method to assess the spatiotemporal gait parameters using smartphone data based on an accelerometer and F-scan is presented. In our method, the gait data sets are firstly collected from both the triaxial accelerometer embedded in the Samsung S9 and the Insole shoes for both feet and lower limbs. Ten healthy adults walked three times with two smartphones and two insole shoes attached. Then, during each trial, the participants walked along a 10-m walkway in a laboratory setting and were then recorded after wearing appropriate sized shoes with the sensors inserted inside them and two smartphones attached. Three parameters of gait: step time, stride time and cadence were calculated. The performance of the proposed method using insole shoes and smartphones was evaluated based on reliability and validity. Based on the obtained results by the developed method with three parameters, it was noticed that the insole shoes and the smartphone recorded consistent results. The developed method achieved an average standard deviation and interclass correlation coefficient rate of 0.03-2.4 and 0.41-0.98, respectively. The results highlighted specific opportunities for the smartphone as a commercial device to serve gait analysis methods. In addition, the results demonstrated that the smartphone can be an effective and efficient tool to assess gait.