Inside clinical research, gait analysis is a fundamental part of the functional evaluation of the human body's movement. Its evaluation has been carried out through different methods and tools, which allow early diagnosis of diseases, and monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of therapeutic plans applied to patients for rehabilitation. The observational method is one of the most used in specialized centers in Colombia; however, to avoid any possible errors associated with the subjectivity observation, technological tools that provide quantitative data can support this method. This paper deals with the methodological process for developing a computational tool and hardware device for the analysis of gait, specifically on articular kinematics of the knee. This work develops a prototype based on the fusion of inertial measurement units (IMU) data as an alternative for the attenuation of errors associated with each of these technologies. A videogrammetry technique measured the same human gait patterns to validate the proposed system, in terms of accuracy and repeatability of the recorded data. Results showed that the developed prototype successfully captured the kneejoint angles of the flexion-extension motions with high consistency and accuracy in with the measurements obtained from the videogrammetry technique. Statistical analysis (ICC and RMSE) exhibited a high correlation between the two systems for the measures of the joint angles. These results suggest the possibility of using an IMU-based prototype in realistic scenarios for accurately tracking a patient's knee-joint kinematics during a human gait.
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.