Walking Analysis using an Acceleration Sensor

It is important to evaluate walking stability to improve people's health. There are many cases of unstable walking even if people think they are in good health. A small, light acceleration sensor was attached to subjects' center of gravity to measure the acceleration displacement while the subjects were walking. By using the seasonal adjustment model it was possible to predict the periodic fluctuations observed, decomposing the original data into factors representing stability and instability. We suggest the walking stability of each subject using the ratio of the variance of instability to the variance of stability. This study provides useful information for understanding walking systems in preventive medicine and rehabilitative medicine.

I. Introduction

Recently, people regard walking, one of the most basic activities, as an important key to maintaining their health. However, people are generally unaware of the fact that their walking is unstable, and even people who are aware do not understand, quantitatively, to what degree their walking is unstable. If they continue to walk unstably, this may cause lower-back pain or knee pain, unstable walking is also bad for many other bodily functions. So it is important to analyze walking stability, quantitatively, to improve people's health. However, quantitative analyses of the walking stability of normal subjects were not previously analyzed [1], [2].