Detecting Changes in Functional State: A Comparative Analysis Using Wearable Sensors and a Sensorized Tip

Gait analysis can provide relevant information about the physical and neurological conditions of individuals. For this reason, several studies have recently been carried out in an attempt to monitor people's gait and automatically detect gait anomalies. Among the various monitoring systems available for gait analysis, wearable sensors are considered the gold standard due to their wide capture range and low cost. However, in the case of people that require assistive devices for walking, some studies have proposed the use of sensorized devices in order to minimize invasiveness. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of comparative works that evaluate the performance of sensorized assistive devices for walking with widely used wearable sensors. Hence, this paper presents a comparison between the performance of accelerometer-based wearable sensors and a sensorized tip developed by the authors to detect gait anomalies. The comparative study has been carried out in a controlled environment with five healthy subjects, in which three different physical states have been simulated. A machine-learning based anomaly detection approach has been implemented based on the data captured by a set of wearable sensors and the sensorized tip, and the overall performance of both monitoring systems has been evaluated. Results show that even if both devices can provide an average accuracy of more than 80% in gait anomaly detection, the sensorized tip provides better performance.