IMU-Kinect

Abstract

Gait rehabilitation is a common method of postoperative recovery after the user sustains an injury or disability. However, traditional gait rehabilitations are usually performed under the supervision of rehabilitation specialists, meaning the patients can not receive adequate care continuously. In this paper, we propose IMU-Kinect, a novel system to remotely and continuously monitor the gait rehabilitation via the wearable kit. This system consists of a wearable hardware platform and a user-friendly software application. The hardware platform is composed of four Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), which are attached on the shanks and thighs of the human body. The software application is able to estimate the rotation and displacement of these sensors, then reconstruct the gait movements and calculate the gait parameters according to the geometric model of human lower limbs. Based on IMU-Kinect system, the users of gait rehabilitation just need to walk normally by wearing the IMU-Kinect kit, and then the rehabilitation specialists can analyze the status of postoperative recovery by remotely viewing the animations about users' gait movements and charts of the general gait parameters. Extend experiments in real environment show that our system can efficiently track the gait movements with 9% rotation and displacement error.