Affordable Human Gait Analysis Using a Virtual Reality-Based Platform

This article presents a low-cost educational platform to teach human gait instability assessment using the Lyapunov exponents. The system consists of a cellphone used to measure the acceleration or angular velocity of human body segments, a head-mounted display device, a second cellphone used to visualize the virtual environment developed in Unity3D, a device used to measure the gait speed, and a MATLAB application for data processing. The proposed platform was tested on ten healthy subjects (33.4±9.1 years) under three walking conditions: (i) in a real-world environment, (ii) in a virtual corridor, and (iii) by adding optical flow perturbations to the virtual environment. A survey conducted in the elective class Automatic Systems of Analysis and Capture of Human Gait at Universidad del Cauca, showed the usability of the proposed platform.