Gait Assesment using Microwave Radars mounted on Standard Walker

Gait rehabilitation is a complex process considering the complexity of movement that involves different parts of the human body. To assure the safety of the rehabilitation process walking aids are a common indication in clinics, the standard walker being one of the most prescribed taking into account its stability. Embedding sensors on the level of the walker can provide additional capabilities associated with gait monitoring that may be used to evaluate the user gait rehabilitation outcome. Sensing user motion during walker usage can be also used to avoid wrong usage that can conduct to falls. In the current study a standard walker with two Microwave Doppler radars was implemented to extract information on user gait during the rehabilitation process as well as information about the sequence of the standard walker usage. The signals acquired from the measurement channels were considered for time-frequency analysis, including features extraction such as mean instantaneous frequency (MIF) and mean instantaneous bandwidth (MIB) to characterize normal and abnormal gait. The capabilities of time-frequency analysis methods as the starting point on gait classification is also considered.