Real-time Human Pose Estimation at the Edge for Gait Analysis at a Distance

Enrico Martini, Michele Boldo, Stefano Aldegheri, Mirco De Marchi, Nicola Valè, Mirko Filippetti, Nicola Smania, Matteo Bertucco, Alessandro Picelli, Nicola Bombieri

Abstract: Health telematics is a major improvement on patient lives and has shown to be a key practice to deliver healthcare services, overcoming geographical, temporal, and even organizational barriers. One of the main challenges is to perform gait analysis at a distance through camera-based platforms, which requires the system to satisfy, beside accuracy and real-time, also portability and privacy compliance at the same time. We address this challenge by proposing a portable and low-cost platform that implements real-time and accurate 3D human pose estimation through an embedded software on a low-power off-the-shelf computing device that guarantees privacy by default and by design. We evaluated both accuracy and performance of the proposed solution through an infra-red marker-based motion capture system as ground truth to understand if and how such a portable technology can be used for gait analysis at a distance without leading to different clinical interpretations.