Design & Development of IoT Based Rehabilitation Outdoor Landscape for Gait Phase Recognition

Abstract

Over a few decades, there is a steady accretion of life expectancy in many countries. Significant advances in modern healthcare technologies, medicines and overall health care awareness gave many to lead a prolonged healthy life. Over the past few years, there has been a huge demand for unobtrusive health monitoring systems from both medical professionals and the general populace to use these technologies for understanding the general health well being in order to improve life longevity. However, most of the available technologies for health monitoring are difficult for the general populace to access and most of the developed health monitoring systems are either deployed in a controlled environment or in healthcare facilities, thus severely limiting the ease of access to many, especially the elderly people. For effective health management of elderly people, evidence-based decision making, continuously monitoring the health status of the elderly demographic is paramount. In order to address these issues, we developed an innovative smart IoT based outdoor health monitoring system. The proposed system collects information about the mobility, posture, and overall gait of the person in an easy to access public outdoor setting such as parks, supermarkets etc. It is quite evident from multiple studies, that analysing the gait can be a useful tool in early detection of the declining health of individuals, as mobility is a key factor in any individual's well being. Also, detecting gait disorders earlier will allow for functional relief to the health care system with the possibility of reducing the number and severity of gait disorders through early intervention.