Design Of Human Gait Information Acquisition System

Gait is a kind of complex movement process, which can reflect the body’s physiological functions, health status and so on. And different diseases may have different special gait, such as special hemiplegic gait caused by central nerve damage. Human gait parameters will play an important role on diagnosis and treatment of clinical disease, especially on nervous system disease.Currently, clinical gait analysis is mainly done in either a professional motion laboratory using three-dimensional gait analysis system or in a doctor’s office with the physicians making visual observations. Analysis in a laboratory may provide well-quantified and accurate results, but the devices are expensive and complicated to operate. Visual observation is inexpensive and does not need any auxiliary equipment, while the results are qualitative and can’t provide precise evaluation of the patient’s gait.As the requirement of medical development, we design a kind of human gait information acquisition system based on inertial sensors. The system is mainly composed of two inertial sensor data acquisition nodes and a handled data memory. Data acquisition node uses high precision ten axis inertial sensor to collect sensor data and then upload sensor data to data memory through nRF24L01. Data memory is responsible for controlling the process of measurement by sending commands and storing sensor data into TF card. In addition, small embedded GUI interface was used to design an interpersonal interaction interface. After the measurement, importing sensor data into computer through card reader and then gait analysis software uses data fusion algorithm to calculate gait parameters.In order to examine the validity and availability of the human gait information acquisition system, walking analysis experiments of normal gait were conducted. Ten subjects (six men and four females whose ages range from 21 to 30 years old.) took participate in the outdoor environment test and each subject tested for five times. The experimental results demonstrate that the analyzer has the potential of providing important clues for the diagnosis of the disease.