Development of Minimum Toe Clearance Detector for a Tripping Prediction

Abstract

Falls of elderly during walking cause serious injury as fracture probably. Most of falls results from tripping, Minimum Toe Clearance(MinTC) indicating easiness to tripping was studied by a lot of researchers. It was reported that variability of MinTC was greater in the elderly than the young. This paper proposes a method to make a judgement on easiness to tripping based on the height of MinTC using One Dimensional Brightness Distribution Sensor. For the purpose, we detected the difference between normal gait and dangerous gait using our method. As a result, our method obtained the significant difference between normal and dangerous gait. In conclusion, we clearly judged normal gait or dangerous gait using our proposal system. In the future, we should test at the actual environment, develop further.