Evaluation and Application of a Customizable Wireless Platform: A Body Sensor Network for Unobtrusive Gait Analysis in Everyday Life

Using Synthesized IMU Data to Train a Long-Short Term Memory-based Neural Network for Unobtrusive Gait Analysis with a Sparse Sensor Setup

In this work, we evaluated the possibility to use synthesized IMU data for training a deep neural network to generate a more complex, full-body description of the human gait in terms of joint angle trajectories from a sparse sensor setup. In this context, a sparse sensor setup consists of a few sensors attached to human body segments in an unobtrusive manner to possibly provide a monitoring system in an everyday life scenario. Since the relation between the input IMU data and the output joint angle trajectories is highly non-linear, neural networks appear to provide an optimal framework to formulate a mapping description. Especially with respect to periodic signals, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have gained importance in the recent years. In this work, we have used a special type of RNNs that can be implemented by using long-short term memory (LSTM) cells, which have shown promising results when being applied to sequential data. The artificial training data was generated by a simulative human gait model and virtually attached sensor devices. The trained network was subsequently validated by a dataset that was recorded from a treadmill walking trial using a motion capturing system and an IMU sensor system. The qualitative comparison already shows promising results, however, this study can only be considered to provide preliminary results in this area. Clinical Relevance- This approach has the potential to be applied in the remote assessment of gait behavior during everyday life environments using an unobtrusive sensor net-work. In particular for monitoring older people suffering from an increased fall risk or any significant gait impairments this work is of possible interest.

Identification of Individually Altered Gait Behavior Using an Unobtrusive IMU Sensor Setup

Gait behavior is considered an important indicator for the assessment of the general health status and provides a diagnostic observation for neuro-degenerative and musculo-skeletal diseases. Individual changes in gait behavior often reflect a deterioration of the current health status in a general sense and therefore provide significant information for clinicians and care-givers. In this work, we have used an unobtrusive sensor setup comprising three inertial measurement units (IMUs) located at the wrist, the chest and the thigh to obtain an objective measure of the human locomotion. We conducted a clinical trial in a movement laboratory environment to obtain a database of gait data at different walking speeds and conditions. The aging-simulation suit GERT was used to deteriorate the individual gait behavior during the experiments. Treadmill walking trials were used to train different classifiers to discriminate normal walking from GERT-affected walking patterns. Level-ground walking trials were used to validate the previously generated classifiers. A five-fold cross validation during the training process yielded overall F₁-scores between 0.965 and 0.986. The validation tests showed promising results with prediction accuracies of more than 80%. Clinical relevance- The clinical relevance of this contri-bution can be considered two-fold. First we demonstrate the possibility of an unobtrusive monitoring system to iden-tify individual deterioration of gait behavior. Second we also validate the use of aging-simulation suits to introduce individual changes of gait patterns in healthy subjects to create a database of simulated yet realistic gait impairments associated with aging.

A Wearable, Multi-Frequency Device to Measure Muscle Activity Combining Simultaneous Electromyography and Electrical Impedance Myography

The detection of muscle contraction and the estimation of muscle force are essential tasks in robot-assisted rehabilitation systems. The most commonly used method to investigate muscle contraction is surface electromyography (EMG), which, however, shows considerable disadvantages in predicting the muscle force, since unpredictable factors may influence the detected force but not necessarily the EMG data. Electrical impedance myography (EIM) investigates the change in electrical impedance during muscle activities and is another promising technique to investigate muscle functions. This paper introduces the design, development, and evaluation of a device that performs EMG and EIM simultaneously for more robust measurement of muscle conditions subject to artifacts. The device is light, wearable, and wireless and has a modular design, in which the EMG, EIM, micro-controller, and communication modules are stacked and interconnected through connectors. As a result, the EIM module measures the bioimpedance between 20 and 200 Ω with an error of less than 5% at 140 SPS. The settling time during the calibration phase of this module is less than 1000 ms. The EMG module captures the spectrum of the EMG signal between 20–150 Hz at 1 kSPS with an SNR of 67 dB. The micro-controller and communication module builds an ARM-Cortex M3 micro-controller which reads and transfers the captured data every 1 ms over RF (868 Mhz) with a baud rate of 500 kbps to a receptor connected to a PC. Preliminary measurements on a volunteer during leg extension, walking, and sit-to-stand showed the potential of the system to investigate muscle function by combining simultaneous EMG and EIM.