Gait Impairment Assessment Service for Community-Dwelling Older Adults

Xin Hu, Ke Xue, Shen Wang, Deqiong Ding, Yongqing Han, Zhao Sun, Xiyu Gao, Minjun Tian, Bo Sang, Zhilin Zhang, Dianhui Chu

Abstract: Older adults want to remain independent with dignity for as long as possible. Gait assessment service plays an essential role in elderly care and rehabilitation by evaluating gait impairment, to provide suitable and continuous treatments. Despite over a decade of research and development in gait assessment, accurate and reliable gait assessment service for older adults in use are few. We propose an automatic gait impairment assessment service, for community-dwelling older adults, by combining multiple LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensing with 11-meter walking test. Multiple sensors fusion strategy is employed to sense and interpret gaits in a complementary way. Leveraging scan-matching technology and foot tracking method, the gait assessment service can achieve high accuracy with reasonable cost and no privacy issue. The experiment results show obvious differences of disease-specific motor symptoms in comparing groups. The potential merit of gait assessment service in daily use is also explored in this study.