Research Article
One IMU Is Sufficient: A Study Evaluating Effects of Dual-Tasks on Gait in Elderly People
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-37893-5_6, author={Rolf Adelsberger and Nathan Theill and Vera Schumacher and Bert Arnrich and Gerhard Tr\o{}ster}, title={One IMU Is Sufficient: A Study Evaluating Effects of Dual-Tasks on Gait in Elderly People}, proceedings={Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare. Third International Conference, MobiHealth 2012, Paris, France, November 21-23, 2012, Revised Selected Papers}, proceedings_a={MOBIHEALTH}, year={2013}, month={4}, keywords={wearable computing gait analysis elderly people risk of falling imu sensors}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-37893-5_6} }- Rolf Adelsberger
Nathan Theill
Vera Schumacher
Bert Arnrich
Gerhard Tröster
Year: 2013
One IMU Is Sufficient: A Study Evaluating Effects of Dual-Tasks on Gait in Elderly People
MOBIHEALTH
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-37893-5_6
Abstract
In industrialized countries the share of elderly subjects is increasing. Hence, diseases or symptoms associated with aging are more common than they were in the past. As a consequence, more effort is invested into research analyzing the effects of aging on the motion and cognition. However, economical and flexible methods to measure motion and its cross-effects with cognition are still missing. Therefore, we developed a new approach which neither requires a specific location, large infrastructural requirements, nor does it require large investments. We base our setting on match-box sized inertial measurement units (IMUs) attached to the participants’ legs. 47 elderly subjects participated in our study where we analyzed the interplay between cognitive load and gait features. We show that it is feasible to automatically detect episodes of interest, e.g. straight path, during walking periods of a subject only using IMU data. Our approach detects the steps autonomously and calculates gait features without supervision. The results demonstrate that cognitive load induces a significant increase ( = 0.007) in step-duration variability from 16 (baseline) to 21 (load). Our findings demonstrate that IMUs are a proved alternative to static setups that usually require a non-trivial infrastructure, e.g. optical movement tracking.