Article

The estimation of gait temporal parameters with inertial measurement units (IMU)
is a research topic of interest in clinical gait analysis.
Several methods, based
on the use of a single IMU mounted at waist level, have been proposed for the
estimate of these parameters showing satisfactory performance when applied to the
gait of healthy subjects. However, the above mentioned methods were developed and
validated on healthy subjects and their applicability in pathological gait
conditions was not systematically explored. We tested the three best performing
methods found in a previous comparative study on data acquired from 10 older
adults, 10 hemiparetic, 10 Parkinson's disease and 10 Huntington's disease
subjects. An instrumented gait mat was used as gold standard. When pathological
populations were analyzed, missed or extra events were found for all methods and
a global decrease of their performance was observed to different extents
depending on the specific group analyzed. The results revealed that none of the
tested methods outperformed the others in terms of accuracy of the gait
parameters determination for all the populations except the Parkinson's disease
subjects group for which one of the methods performed better than others. The
hemiparetic subjects group was the most critical group to analyze (stride
duration errors between 4-5 % and step duration errors between 8-13 % of the
actual values across methods). Only one method provides estimates of the stance
and swing durations which however should be interpreted with caution in
pathological populations (stance duration errors between 6-14 %, swing duration
errors between 10-32 % of the actual values across populations).
CI - Copyright (c) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS