Gait analysis is an important medical diagnostic process and has many applications in healthcare, rehabilitation, therapy, and exercise training. However, typical gait analysis has to be performed in a gait laboratory, which is inaccessible for a large population and cannot provide natural gait measures. In this paper, we present a novel sensor device, namely, Smart Insole, to tackle the challenge of efficient gait monitoring in real life. An array of electronic textile (eTextile) based pressure sensors are integrated in the insole to fully measure the plantar pressure. Smart Insole is also equipped with a low-cost inertial measurement unit including a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope, and a 3axis magnetometer to capture the gait characteristics in motion. Smart Insole can offer precise acquisition of gait information. Meanwhile, it is lightweight, thin, and comfortable to wear, providing an unobtrusive way to perform the gait monitoring. Furthermore, a smartphone graphic user interface is developed to display the sensor data in real-time via Bluetooth low energy. We perform a set of experiments in four real-life scenes including hallway walking, ascending/descending stairs, and slope walking, where gait parameters and features are extracted. Finally, the limitation and improvement, wearability and usability, further work, and healthcare-related potential applications are discussed.
Quality of sleep is an important indicator of health and well being. Recent developments in the field of in-home sleep monitoring have the potential to enhance a person's sleeping experience and contribute to an overall sense of well being. Existing in-home sleep monitoring devices either fail to provide adequate sleep information or are obtrusive to use. To overcome these obstacles, a noncontact and cost-effective sleep monitoring system, named SleepSense, is proposed for continuous recognition of the sleep status, including on-bed movement, bed exit, and breathing section. SleepSense consists of three parts: a Doppler radar-based sensor, a robust automated radar demodulation module, and a sleep status recognition framework. Herein, several time-domain and frequency-domain features are extracted for the sleep recognition framework. A prototype of SleepSense is presented and evaluated using two sets of experiments. In the short-term controlled experiment, the SleepSense achieves an overall 95.1% accuracy rate in identifying various sleep status. In the 75-minute sleep study, SleepSense demonstrates wide usability in real life. The error rate for breathing rate extraction in this study is only 6.65%. These experimental results indicate that SleepSense is an effective and promising solution for in-home sleep monitoring.
Sleep posture is a key component in sleep quality assessment and pressure ulcer prevention. Currently, body pressure analysis has been a popular method for sleep posture recognition. In this paper, a matching-based approach, Body-Earth Mover's Distance (BEMD), for sleep posture recognition is proposed. BEMD treats pressure images as weighted 2D shapes, and combines EMD and Euclidean distance for similarity measure. Compared with existing work, sleep posture recognition is achieved with posture similarity rather than multiple features for specific postures. A pilot study is performed with 14 persons for six different postures. The experimental results show that the proposed BEMD can achieve 91.21% accuracy, which outperforms the previous method with an improvement of 8.01%.
Nurses regularly perform patient handling activities. These activities with awkward postures expose healthcare providers to a high risk of overexertion injury. The recognition of patient handling activities is the first step to reduce injury risk for caregivers. The current practice on workplace activity recognition is based on human observational approach, which is neither accurate nor projectable to a large population. In this paper, we aim at addressing these challenges. Our solution comprises a smart wearable device and a novel spatio-temporal warping (STW) pattern recognition framework. The wearable device, named Smart Insole 2.0, is equipped with a rich set of sensors and can provide an unobtrusive way to automatically capture the information of patient handling activities. The STW pattern recognition framework fully exploits the spatial and temporal characteristics of plantar pressure by calculating a novel warped spatio-temporal distance, to quantify the similarity for the purpose of activity recognition. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we perform a pilot study with eight subjects, including eight common activities in a nursing room. The experimental results show the overall classification accuracy achieves 91.7%. Meanwhile, the qualitative profile and load level can also be classified with accuracies of 98.3% and 92.5%, respectively.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.