Full body gait analysis with Kinect

• Published in: 2012 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Vol. 2012; pp. 1964 - 1967
• Main Authors: Gabel, M., Gilad-Bachrach, R., Renshaw, E., Schuster, A.
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 2012
• Subjects: Accuracy; Adult; Arm - physiology; Female; Foot; Gait - physiology; Humans; Joints; Male; Middle Aged; Monitoring, Ambulatory - instrumentation; Robustness; Time Factors
• ISBN: 1424441196; 9781424441198
• ISSN: 1094-687X; 1557-170X; 1558-4615
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2012.6346340

Human gait is an important indicator of health, with applications ranging from diagnosis, monitoring, and rehabilitation. In practice, the use of gait analysis has been limited. Existing gait analysis systems are either expensive, intrusive, or require well-controlled environments such as a clinic or a laboratory. We present an accurate gait analysis system that is economical and non-intrusive. Our system is based on the Kinect sensor and thus can extract comprehensive gait information from all parts of the body. Beyond standard stride information, we also measure arm kinematics, demonstrating the wide range of parameters that can be extracted. We further improve over existing work by using information from the entire body to more accurately measure stride intervals. Our system requires no markers or battery-powered sensors, and instead relies on a single, inexpensive commodity 3D sensor with a large preexisting install base. We suggest that the proposed technique can be used for continuous gait tracking at home.