A portable smart belt design for home-based gait parameter collection

The process of walking or running is called the 'gait'. In clinical research, gait detection can be used to investigate the features of normal or abnormal gait for demonstrating a change from treatment or from disease progression. In the past, many optical-based gait detection approaches have been proposed. In these approaches, we have to paste many reflective markers on the subject's limbs and use multiple cameras from different directions to take the images of walking. They can provide high accuracy measurements for gait detection, but they also need very expensive optical equipment. Also, the experiments are restricted to the laboratory environment, which means that the collection of gait data will be limited in a short distance or a short time interval. In this paper we will propose a portable design, which uses dual accelerometers pasted on a subject's left and right waist to do the gait detection at any time, any place. Particularly, we will apply the wireless communication to develop a gateway, as well as its Apps on the smart phone, to collect sensing data. The data collected from the sensors can be uploaded to the remote cloud for many telemedicine applications.