Gait-based Human Identification through Minimum Gait-phases and Sensors

The incredible pace at which the world’s elderly population is growing will put severe burdens on current healthcare systems and resources. To alleviate this concern the health care systems must rely on the transformation of eldercare and old homes to use Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). Human identification is one of the most common and critical tasks for condition monitoring, human-machine interaction, and providing assistive services in such environments. Recently, human gait has gained new attention as a biometric for identification to achieve contactless identification from a distance robust to physical appearances. However, an important aspect of gait identification through wearables and image-based systems alike is accurate identification when limited information is available for example, when only a fraction of the whole gait cycle or only a part of the subject’s body is visible. In this paper, we present a gait identification technique based on temporal and descriptive statistic parameters of different gait phases as the features and we investigate the performance of using only single gait phases for the identification task using a minimum number of sensors. Gait data were collected from 60 individuals through pelvis and foot sensors. Six different machine learning algorithms were used for identification. It was shown that it is possible to achieve high accuracy of over 95.5% by monitoring a single phase of the whole gait cycle through only a single sensor. It was also shown that the proposed methodology could be used to achieve 100% identification accuracy when the whole gait cycle was monitored through pelvis and foot sensors combined. The ANN was found to be more robust to less number of data features compared to SVM and was concluded as the best machine algorithm for the purpose.