Detection of stride time and stance phase ratio from accelerometer data for gait analysis

Abstract

Stride time and stance phase ratio are supportive biomarkers used in the diagnosis and treatment of gait disorders and are currently frequently used in research studies. In this study, the 3-axis accelerometer signal, taken from the foot, was denoised by a low-pass FIR (finite impulse response) filter. By using the fundamental frequency analysis the dominant frequency was found and with that frequency an optimal length for a window to be shifted across the whole signal for further purposes. And the turning region was extracted by using the Pearson correlation coefficient with the segments that overlapped by shifting the selected window over the whole signal, after getting the walking segments the stride time parameter is calculated by using a simple peak-picking algorithm. The stance and swing periods of the pseudo-steps, which emerged as a result of the double step time calculation algorithm, were found with the dynamic time warping method, and the ratio of the stance phase in a step to the whole step was calculated as a percentage. The results found were compared with the results of the APDM system, and the mean absolute error rate was calculated as 0.029 s for the stride time and 0.0084 for the stance phase ratio.