Gait measurement system using laser range finder

With our society rapidly aging, it is worried that the burden on families who have members in need of nursing care increase. The elderly people sometimes have come to require nursing care caused by falling. To reduce the risk of fallings in elderly, gait training is conducted in community health activities. In order to evaluate the effect of gait training, the measurement system of gait performance is performed. With conventional gait measurement systems using a force plate or a 3-dimensional motion measuring device, it is difficult to introduce in community health activities because of its scale and cost. Therefore, a gait measurement system with easy to use and low cost is needed. In this study, a gait measurement system using a laser range finder (LRF) is proposed. In the proposed system, legs of the subject are detected based on pattern recognition for the range data of LRF. Then, the system obtains the human motions in the horizontal plane and extracts the particular kinematic parameters during walking. To verify the validity of the extracted parameters, the proposed system was applied to the walking test. The subjects walk on the predesignated targets in a verification test. From the results, it was confirmed that the proposed system can measure foot contact time, position and velocity of both legs with accuracy.