Assessment of Gait's Regularity Due to Physical Fatigue Using Acceleration Data

Fatigue in workers is a significant problem in the modern industry, largely because of high demand jobs, long duty periods, disruption of circadian rhythms, and accumulative sleep debt that are common in many industries. Fatigue is the end result of the integration of multiple factors such as time awake, time of day, and workload. It is known that fatigue has an association with work performance and increasing errors/accidents. This social and economic problem requires the full understanding of fatigue to its effective management at the workplace. In this work, we measure the regularity of the stride of human gait in a group of twelve people, in good health conditions. By means of an accelerometer placed on the hip, we recorded the acceleration values during the walk with and without fatigue. By means of the correlation of the strides, we measure its regularity. Our objective was to know how is affected the gait when a person is tired due to physical fatigue. We found that stride of human gait is affected when a person is fatigued. We conclude that physical fatigue can affect a person's normal gait.