Citation

Weiss V, Bologna G, Cloix S, Hasler D, Pun T. Procedia Comput. Sci. 2014; 39: 43-50.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.procs.2014.11.008

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This study investigates the design of a novel real-time system to detect walking behavior changes using an accelerometer on a rollator. No sensor is required on the user. We propose a new non-invasive approach to detect walking behavior based on the motion transfer by the user on the walker. Our method has two main steps; the first is to extract a gait feature vector by analyzing the three-axis accelerometer data in terms of magnitude, gait cycle and frequency. The second is to classify gait with the use of a decision tree of multilayer perceptrons. To assess the performance of our technique, we evaluated different sampling window lengths of 1, 3 an 5 seconds and four different Neural Network architectures. The results revealed that the algorithm can distinguish walking behavior such as normal, slow and fast with an accuracy of about 86%. This research study is part of a project aiming at providing a simple and non-invasive walking behavior detector for elderly who use rollators.