Walking Behavior Change Detector for a “Smart” Walker

This study investigates the design of a novel real-time system to detect walking behavior changes using an accelerometer on a rollator. No sensor is required on the user. We propose a new non-invasive approach to detect walking behavior based on the motion transfer by the user on the walker. Our met...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Procedia computer science 2014, Vol.39, p.43-50
Main Authors: Weiss, Viviana, Bologna, Guido, Cloix, Séverine, Hasler, David, Pun, Thierry
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accelerometer
Elderly care
Gait Analysis
Gerontechnology
HCI
Interpersonal variability
Mobility
Walking Behavior
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Summary:This study investigates the design of a novel real-time system to detect walking behavior changes using an accelerometer on a rollator. No sensor is required on the user. We propose a new non-invasive approach to detect walking behavior based on the motion transfer by the user on the walker. Our method has two main steps; the first is to extract a gait feature vector by analyzing the three-axis accelerometer data in terms of magnitude, gait cycle and frequency. The second is to classify gait with the use of a decision tree of multilayer perceptrons. To assess the performance of our technique, we evaluated different sampling window lengths of 1, 3 an 5seconds and four different Neural Network architectures. The results revealed that the algorithm can distinguish walking behavior such as normal, slow and fast with an accuracy of about 86%. This research study is part of a project aiming at providing a simple and non-invasive walking behavior detector for elderly who use rollators.
ISSN:1877-0509
1877-0509
DOI:10.1016/j.procs.2014.11.008