Article

This paper represents the first step in developing an inertial sensor system that
is capable of assessing post-stroke gait in terms of walking speed and temporal
gait symmetry. Two inertial sensors were attached at the midpoint of each shank
to measure the accelerations and angular velocity during walking. Despite the
abnormalities in hemiparetic gait, the angular velocity of most of the testing
subjects (12 out of 13) exhibited similar characteristics as those from a healthy
population, enabling walking speed estimation and gait event detection based on
the pendulum walking model. The results from a standardized 10-meter walk test
demonstrated that the IMU-based method has an excellent agreement with the
clinically used stopwatch method. The gait symmetry results were comparable with
previous studies. The gait segmentation failed when the angular velocity deviates
significantly from the healthy groups' profile. With further development and
concurrent validations, the inertial sensor-based system may eventually become a
useful tool for continually monitoring spatio-temporal gait parameters post
stroke in a natural environment.
CI - Copyright (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS