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PostprintThis is the accepted version of a paper published in IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Abstract-Detecting gait events is the key to many gait analysis applications that would benefit from continuous monitoring or long-term analysis. Most gait event detection algorithms using wearable sensors that offer a potential for use in daily living have been developed from data collected in controlled indoor experiments. However, for real-word applications, it is essential that the analysis is carried out in humans' natural environment; that involves different gait speeds, changing walking terrains, varying surface inclinations and regular turns among other factors. Existing domain knowledge in the form of principles or underlying fundamental gait relationships can be utilized to drive and support the data analysis in order to develop robust algorithms that can tackle real-world challenges in gait analysis. This paper presents a novel approach that exhibits how domain knowledge about human gait can be incorporated into time-frequency analysis to detect gait events from longterm accelerometer signals. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm are validated by experiments done in indoor and outdoor environments with approximately 93,600 gait events in total. The proposed algorithm exhibits consistently high performance scores across all datasets in both, indoor and outdoor environments.

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The major problem associated with the walking of humanoid robots is to maintain its dynamic equilibrium while walking. To achieve this one must detect gait instability during walking to apply proper fall avoidance schemes and bring back the robot into stable equilibrium. A good approach to detect gait instability is to study the evolution of the attitude of the humanoid's trunk. Most attitude estimation techniques involve using the information from inertial sensors positioned at the trunk. However, inertial sensors like accelerometer and gyro are highly prone to noise which lead to poor attitude estimates that can cause false fall detections and falsely trigger fall avoidance schemes. In this paper we present a novel way to access the information from joint encoders present in the legs and fuse it with the information from inertial sensors to provide a highly improved attitude estimate during humanoid walk. Also if the joint encoders' attitude measure is compared separately with the IMU's attitude estimate, then it is observed that they are different when there is a change of contact between the stance leg and the ground. This may be used to detect a loss of contact and can be verified by the information from force sensors present at the feet of the robot. The propositions are validated by experiments performed on humanoid robot NAO.

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Abstract:Many gait analysis applications involve long-term or continuous monitoring which require gait measurements to be taken outdoors. Wearable inertial sensors like accelerometers have become popular for such applications as they are miniature, low-powered and inexpensive but with the drawback that they are prone to noise and require robust algorithms for precise identification of gait events. However, most gait event detection algorithms have been developed by simulating physical world environments inside controlled laboratories. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that robustly and efficiently identifies gait events from accelerometer signals collected during both, indoor and outdoor walking of healthy subjects. The proposed method makes adept use of prior knowledge of walking gait characteristics, referred to as expert knowledge, in conjunction with continuous wavelet transform analysis to detect gait events of heel strike and toe off. It was observed that in comparison to indoor, the outdoor walking acceleration signals were of poorer quality and highly corrupted with noise. The proposed algorithm presents an automated way to effectively analyze such noisy signals in order to identify gait events.