Academic Innovations

Ability to walk (manner of walking being gait) is fundamental to healthy living, emphasizing gait quantification. Gait can be heterogeneous irrespective of whether healthy or with hemiplegia, parkinsonism, osteoarthritis, flat-foot, foot-drop, needing knee surgery, gait rehabilitation, etc. Conventional gait quantification using foot imprints, though inexpensive, suffers from measurement subjectivity. Alternatively, Camera-based systems and Walkmats suffer from operational complexity, high-cost, and limited portability. Accelerometers and gyroscopes are portable and cost-effective, but use model-based approach (limiting inference beyond trained model) to quantify gait, coupled with drift issues. In contrast, force sensors in shoe soles allow direct sensor-based gait-event detection to quantify gait. Multiple sensors increase hardware complexity and too few sensors miss sensing gait abnormalities, making these practically infeasible.