A Proposal for Long-Term Gait Monitoring in Assisted Living Environments Based on an Inertial Sensor Infrastructure

Clinical gait analysis provides an evaluation tool that allows clinicians to characterize person's locomotion at a particular time. There are currently specialized systems to detect gait events and compute spatio-temporal parameters of human gait, which are accurate and redundant. These systems are expensive and are limited to controlled settings with gait evaluations widely spaced in terms of time. As alternative, a proposal for long-term gait monitoring in Assisted Living Environments based on an infrastructure of wireless inertial sensors is presented. Specifically, heel-strike events will be identified in multiple elders in a rest home and throughout the day. A small wearable device composed of a single inertial measurement unit will be placed at the back of each elder, on the thoracic zone, capturing trunk accelerations and orientations which will enable the demarcation of heel-strike events and the computation of temporal gait parameters. This proposal attempts to contribute to the development of a less intrusive and reachable alternative for long-term gait monitoring of multiple residents, which has been poorly investigated.