Title: Heterogeneous data fusion for three-dimensional gait analysis using wearable MARG sensors

Authors: Sen Qiu; Zhelong Wang; Hongyu Zhao; Huosheng Hu

Addresses: School of Control Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China ' School of Control Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China ' School of Control Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China ' Department of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK

Abstract: Gait analysis has become a research highlight. In this paper, we propose a computing method using wearable magnetic angular rate and gravity (MARG) sensor arrays with wireless network, which calculates absolute and relative orientation and position information of human foot motion during level walking and stair climbing process. Three-dimensional foot orientation and position were estimated by a Kalman-based sensor fusion algorithm and validated by ground truth provided by Vicon system. The repeatability of the alignment procedure and the measurement errors were evaluated on healthy subjects. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a good performance at both motion patterns. No significant drifts exist in the overall results presented in the paper. The measured and estimated information can be transmitted to remote server through internet. Moreover, this method could be applied to other cyclical activity monitoring.

Keywords: gait analysis; attitude computation; wireless sensor network; wearable sensors; magnetic angular rate and gravity; MARG.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2017.084154

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2017 Vol.14 No.3, pp.222 - 233

Received: 09 Dec 2014
Accepted: 10 Jul 2015

Published online: 16 May 2017 *

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