Design of a Portable Gait Profiler With Uneven Surface and Low-Light Adaptability

Gait analysis is simply a way of studying how a person walks to learn about their body’s movements and posture. Individuals with conditions that affect their ability to walk, such as cerebral palsy, stroke, or Parkinson’s disease, often undergo gait analysis in a specialized laboratory. The aspects of their walking that are measured determine their specific health issues and provide the information required by clinicians and healthcare providers. While gait tests offer valuable insights, inherent challenges exist for both patients and clinicians. Patients may experience discomfort, anxiety, physical limitations, and cost and accessibility barriers. Clinicians may experience differences in equipment, protocols, and reference values between laboratories, as well as interpretation difficulties. Traditional gait assessment solely depends on observations of things such as joint angles and the range of motion (ROM) with multiple cameras in a specialized room. As patients experience physical strain because of travel and test-related procedures, they may develop stress and anxiety, potentially leading to inaccurate readings. Patients often skip the hospital because they would have to take time off work. The availability of a portable device to measure gait may open the possibility of conducting analysis and rehabilitation in a home setting and can also be a screening tool for community hospitals, which can drastically improve patient recovery. In this work, a portable and easy-to-carry gait profiler was created to overcome the challenges faced by clinicians and patients with traditional gait analysis. The device can collect data in a variety of real-world settings, such as homes, clinics, and the community, offering an alternative to costly and inaccessible lab settings. The profiler precisely captures a patient’s natural gait under actual circumstances via computer vision. Low-light compatibility, which makes use of specialized cameras and infrared emitters to guarantee precise measurements even in poorly lit areas, is one of its primary features. The gait profiler created is a reliable and practical tool for clinical and research use, as it has been demonstrated to possess the same degree of accuracy, robustness, and usefulness as standard gait laboratory tests.