A wearable smartphone-enabled camera-based system for gait assessment

Quantitative assessment of gait parameters provides valuable diagnostic and prognostic information. However, most gait analysis systems are bulky, expensive, and designed to be used indoors or in laboratory settings. Recently, wearable systems have attracted considerable attention due to their lower cost and portability. In this paper, we present a simple wearable smartphone-enabled camera-based system (SmartGait) for measurement of spatiotemporal gait parameters. We assess the concurrent validity of SmartGait as compared to a commercially available pressure-sensing walkway (GaitRite1). Fifteen healthy young adults (25.8 +/- 2.6 years) were instructed to walk at slow, preferred, and fast speed. The measures of step length (SL), step width (SW), step time (ST), gait speed, double support time (DS) and their variability were assessed for agreement between the two systems; absolute error and intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) were determined. Measured gait parameters had modest to excellent agreements (ICCs between 0.731 and 0.982). Overall, SmartGait provides many advantages and is a strong alternative wearable system for laboratory and community-based gait assessment. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.