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Zero velocity updates (ZUPT) is an effective way for the foot-mounted inertial pedestrian navigation systems (IPNS). For the ZUPT technique to work properly, it is necessary to correctly detect the stance phase of each gait cycle. An adaptive stance phase detection method is proposed based solely on an inertial sensor, which deals with the measurement fluctuations in swing and stance phases differently, and applies a clustering algorithm to partition the potential gait phases into true and false clusters, thereby yielding a time threshold to eliminate the false gait phases. The roles of the detection parameters and the relationship between them are analyzed to offer some suggestions for parameter tuning. Detection performance is evaluated with multisubject experimental data collected at varying walking speeds. The evaluation results show that the proposed detection method performs well in the presence of measurement fluctuations, which can make the detection of stance phases more robust and the choice of detection parameters more flexible.Index Terms-Inertial measurement unit (IMU), zero velocity updates (ZUPT), inertial navigation system (INS), pedestrian navigation system (PNS), stance phase detection.1083-4435 (c)

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Abstract-This paper presents a wearable sensor approach to motion measurements of human lower limbs, in which subjects perform specified walking trials at self-administered speeds so that their level walking and stair ascent capacity can be effectively evaluated. After an initial sensor alignment with the reduced error, quaternion is used to represent 3-D orientation and an optimized gradient descent algorithm is deployed to calculate the quaternion derivative. Sensors on the shank offer additional information to accurately determine the instances of both swing and stance phases. The Denavit-Hartenberg convention is used to set up the kinematic chains when the foot stays stationary on the ground, producing state constraints to minimize the estimation error of knee position. The reliability of this system, from the measurement point of view, has been validated by means of the results obtained from a commercial motion tracking system, namely, Vicon, on healthy subjects. The step size error and the position estimation accuracy change are studied. The experimental results demonstrated that the extensively existed sensor misplacement and sensor drift problems can be well solved. The proposed self-contained and environment-independent system is capable of providing consistent tracking of human lower limbs without significant drift.

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Gait and posture are regular activities which are fully controlled by the sensorimotor cortex. In this study, fluctuations of joint angle and asymmetry of foot elevation in human walking stride records are analyzed to assess gait in healthy adults and patients affected with gait disorders. This paper aims to build a low-cost, intelligent and lightweight wearable gait analysis platform based on the emerging body sensor networks, which can be used for rehabilitation assessment of patients with gait impairments. A calibration method for accelerometer and magnetometer was proposed to deal with ubiquitous orthoronal error and magnetic disturbance. Proportional integral controller based complementary filter and error correction of gait parameters have been defined with a multi-sensor data fusion algorithm. The purpose of the current work is to investigate the effectiveness of obtained gait data in differentiating healthy subjects and patients with gait impairments. Preliminary clinical gait experiments results showed that the proposed system can be effective in auxiliary diagnosis and rehabilitation plan formulation compared to existing methods, which indicated that the proposed method has great potential as an auxiliary for medical rehabilitation assessment.