Fusion of Multi-Sensor-Based Biomechanical Gait Analysis Using Vision and Wearable Sensor

Abstract

The purpose of this research work is to investigate the biomechanics of pelvis, hip, knee, and ankle joint motion using a Kinect sensor & inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor during the normal walk. In this paper, a very cost-effective gait analysis system based on Microsoft Kinect v2 and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) device is presented. Kinect sensor is used for acquiring 3D skeleton data (camera (x, y, z), depth (x, y) orientation (x, y, z, w), color (x, y)) with 25 human body joints. For this analysis, the lower extremities joints i.e. spinal cord joint, hip, knee, and ankle joints of both left and right legs are being considered. The main contribution of this research work is the joint angle calculation of lower extremities of human gait based on Microsoft Kinect sensor V2 and IMU sensor. From the law of cosine, the joint angle is calculated between the two joints and plotted for a single subject. We came with the observation that the characteristics of the human knee joint and ankle joint are inversely related to each other. There are two sharp humps for knee and ankle joints during the normal walk. During the swing phase, the knee joint is highly activated while during toe-off and heel strike it is least activated. This analysis of clinical data is very useful for prosthesis limb and exoskeleton design. The stability of calculated joints trajectories is validated using the limit cycle curve. A system is designed for real-time analysis of biomechanics of different lower limbs joints using gait.