Gait Analysis for Post-Stroke Hemiparetic Patient by Multi-Features Fusion Method

Walking is a basic requirement for participating in daily activities. Neurological diseases such as stroke can significantly affect one's gait and thereby restrict one's activities that are a part of daily living. Previous studies have demonstrated that gait temporal parameters are useful for characterizing post-stroke hemiparetic gait. However, no previous studies have investigated the symmetry, regularity and stability of post-stroke hemiparetic gaits. In this study, the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm, sample entropy method and empirical mode decomposition-based stability index were utilized to obtain the three aforementioned types of gait features, respectively. Studies were conducted with 15 healthy control subjects and 15 post-stroke survivors. Experimental results revealed that the proposed features could significantly differentiate hemiparetic patients from healthy control subjects by a Mann-Whitney test (with a p-value of less than 0.05). Finally, four representative classifiers were utilized in order to evaluate the possible capabilities of these features to distinguish patients with hemiparetic gaits from the healthy control subjects. The maximum area under the curve values were shown to be 0.94 by the k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) classifier. These promising results have illustrated that the proposed features have considerable potential to promote the future design of automatic gait analysis systems for clinical practice.

Estimation of Temporal Gait Parameters Using a Human Body Electrostatic Sensing-Based Method

Accurate estimation of gait parameters is essential for obtaining quantitative information on motor deficits in Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, which helps determine disease progression and therapeutic interventions. Due to the demand for high accuracy, unobtrusive measurement methods such as optical motion capture systems, foot pressure plates, and other systems have been commonly used in clinical environments. However, the high cost of existing lab-based methods greatly hinders their wider usage, especially in developing countries. In this study, we present a low-cost, noncontact, and an accurate temporal gait parameters estimation method by sensing and analyzing the electrostatic field generated from human foot stepping. The proposed method achieved an average 97% accuracy on gait phase detection and was further validated by comparison to the foot pressure system in 10 healthy subjects. Two results were compared using the Pearson coefficient r and obtained an excellent consistency (r = 0.99, p < 0.05). The repeatability of the purposed method was calculated between days by intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), and showed good test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.87, p < 0.01). The proposed method could be an affordable and accurate tool to measure temporal gait parameters in hospital laboratories and in patients' home environments.