Abstract
Trip-related falls are one of the major causes of injury among seniors in Canada and can be attributable to an inadequate Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC). Currently, motion capture systems are the gold standard for measuring MTC; however, they are expensive and have a restricted operating area. In this paper, a novel wearable system is proposed that can estimate different foot clearance parameters accurately using only two Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors located at the toe and heel of the shoe. A small-scale preliminary study was conducted to investigate the feasibility of foot clearance estimation using the proposed wearable system. We recruited ten young, healthy females to walk at three self-selected speeds (normal, slow, and fast) while wearing the system. Our data analysis showed an average correlation coefficient of 0.94, 0.94, 0.92 for the normal, slow, and fast speed, respectively, when comparing the ToF signals with motion capture. The ANOVA analysis confirmed these results further by revealing no statistically significant differences between the ToF signals and motion capture data for most of the gait parameters after applying the newly proposed foot angle and offset compensation. In addition, the proposed system can measure the MTC with an average Mean Error (ME) of −0.08 ± 3.69 mm, −0.12 ± 4.25 mm, and −0.10 ± 6.57 mm for normal, slow, and fast walking speeds, respectively. The proposed affordable wearable system has the potential to perform real-time MTC estimation and contribute to future work focused on minimizing tripping risks.
Highlights
Falls are a serious health concern for seniors in Canada as they are the primary cause of injury-related deaths, hospitalizations, and emergency department visits [1]
We propose a novel wearable system that can estimate the Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC) accurately using two Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors located at the toe and heel regions of the shoe
Results showed that the overall Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for heel clearance and toe clearance was 32.2 ± 15.0 mm and 16.9 ± 7.0 mm, respectively [11]
Summary
According to a study conducted by Blake et al., 53% of seniors’ falls are due to tripping [3] This type of fall is typically the result of an unsuccessful or low Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC) that leads to unanticipated contact with the ground [4]. We propose a novel wearable system that can estimate the MTC accurately using two Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors located at the toe and heel regions of the shoe. This affordable system was validated versus the motion capture (mocap) system, which is considered the ground truth. ToF signals by compensating the foot angle at each phase of the gait cycle and removing additional offsets in the ToF data
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