How Many Steps to Represent Individual Gait?

Assessing and reproducing user's mobility has multiple purposes for interactive systems. In particular, the quantification of gait parameters has been used for user modelling, virtual environments, and augmented reality. While many technologies can be used to assess gait, measuring spatio-temporal parameters and their fluctuations, it is important to evaluate how many steps are necessary to represent the gait pattern of an individual, in order to provide better feedback to the user and improve user experience. In this preliminary study, we evaluate the intra-session reliability of spatio-temporal gait parameters for 24 healthy adults walking two trials of 15m in a corridor. Angular velocity data were acquired from body-worn inertial measurement units attached to participants' right and left shanks. An adaptive algorithm was applied for gait event detection, and gait parameters were analyzed according to pre-defined numbers of steps extracted from the full length of the trial. The main contribution of the present analysis is to present a method of gait event detection, segmentation and analysis that can be used for adjusting interactive systems to individual users.