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1. Introduction
Gait stability is an important factor in gait analysis.
Gait stability is the ability of the human body to maintain functional locomotion despite the presence of small
kinematic disturbances or control errors [1]. In recent
years, many researchers had attempted to investigate and
to quantify human gait stability. In previous studies, the
magnitude of kinematic variability was often regarded as
an estimate of gait stability [26]. Little evidence can be
found, however, to support this assumption [7, 8]. Gait
stability derived from kinematic variability only quantifies average differences between strides, independent of
the temporal order in which strides occur. It also does
not contain information on how the locomotor control
system responds to perturbations either within or across
strides [710]. It is also limited, moreover, by its ability
to quantify and provide a discrete measure for representing all data points [8].
Due to these reasons, tools from nonlinear dynamic
system theory were proposed to examine point-to-point
fluctuations in movement trajectories throughout the gait
cycle [1, 7, 8, 10]. Although fluctuations in measurement
data are often described as error or noise in a system, nonlinear dynamic system theory provides a different explanation. It proposes that fluctuation may be a consequence
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2. Methodology
2.1. Wearable Gyroscope Network
In this study, a wearable wireless gait monitoring system was developed to measure the angular rate of huJournal of Robotics and Mechatronics Vol.24 No.4, 2012
man lower extremity during walking. Four wireless gyroscopes (Wireless Inertia-Link from Microstrain, Inc.)
were placed on the right thigh, left thigh, right shank and
left shank (Fig. 1). Each gyroscope had a sampling rate
of 200 Hz and a measurement range of 5.235 rad/s with
a bias stability of 0.00349 rad/s and a nonlinearity of
0.2%. Each wireless gyroscope had an onboard microprocessor performing fundamental data filtering, therefore no
jitter was expected in data. It is important to note that
no further data filtering was performed to retain the spatiotemporal fluctuation or nonlinearity of signals [1, 21].
Code was written in LabVIEW 8.5 to serve as a
communication platform among the wireless gyroscopes,
wireless transceivers and the workstation. By harnessing
the capability of the parallel processing available in Lab-
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