Validation of an inertial-based contact and swing time algorithm for running analysis from a foot mounted IoT enabled wearable.

Abstract

Running gait assessment for shoe type recommendation to avoid injury often takes place within commercial premises. That is not representative of a natural running environment and may influence normal/usual running characteristics. Typically, assessments are costly and performed by an untrained biomechanist or physiotherapist. Thus, use of a low-cost assessment of running gait to recommend shoe type is warranted. Indeed, the recent impact of COVID has heightened the need for a shift toward remote assessment in general due to social-distancing guidelines and restriction of movement to bespoke assessment facilities. Mymo is a Bluetooth-enabled, inertial measurement unit (IMU) wearable worn on the foot. The wearable transmits inertial data via a smartphone application to the Cloud, where algorithms work to recommend a running shoe based upon the users/runner's pronation and foot-strike location/pattern. Here, an additional algorithm is presented to quantify ground contact time and swing/flight time within the Mymo platform to further inform the assessment of a runner's gait. A large cohort of healthy adult and adolescents (n=203, 91M:112F) were recruited to run on a treadmill while wearing the Mymo wearable. Validity of the inertial-based algorithm to quantify ground contact time was established through manual labelling of reference standard ground truth video data, with a presented accuracy between 96.6-98.7% across the two classes with respect to each foot.Clinical Relevance-This establishes the validity of a ground contact and swing times for runner with a low-cost IoT wearable.