Cane with Millimeter Wave Radar for Base of Support Measurement

Base of Support (BoS) is a significant parameter for balance analysis. It is particularly important for people using assistive devices such as canes or walkers, because assistive devices improve the stability of the user by increasing the Base of Support. The objective of this research is to develop a wearable device that is able to analyze balance by measuring the position of the Center of Gravity (CoG) inside the Base of Support while using a cane. In this paper, we present our initial work to measure the Base of Support. We developed an instrumented cane with a millimeter wave radar in order to measure the Base of Support in real time. The point cloud data from the radar were grouped into clusters to identify the points belonging to each foot. A density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm was used for this purpose. Finally, the right and left foot were differentiated based on the position of the centroid of each cluster. Knowing the position of both feet with respect to the cane, we were able to measure the BoS with an error of 92.04 cm
²
(7.38 %).