An Efficient Gait Abnormality Detection Method Based on Classification

Abstract

In the study of human mobility, gait analysis is a well-recognized assessment methodology. Despite its widespread use, doubts exist about its clinical utility, i.e., its potential to influence the diagnostic-therapeutic practice. Gait analysis evaluates the walking pattern (normal/abnormal) based on the gait cycle. Based on the analysis obtained, various applications can be developed in the medical, security, sports, and fitness domain to improve overall outcomes. Wearable sensors provide a convenient, efficient, and low-cost approach to gather data, while machine learning methods provide high accuracy gait feature extraction for analysis. The problem is to identify gait abnormalities and if present, subsequently identify the locations of impairments that lead to the change in gait pattern of the individual. Proper physiotherapy treatment can be provided once the location/landmark of the impairment is known correctly. In this paper, classification of multiple anatomical regions and their combination on a large scale highly imbalanced dataset is carried out. We focus on identifying 27 different locations of injury and formulate it as a multi-class classification approach. The advantage of this method is the convenience and simplicity as compared to previous methods. In our work, a benchmark is set to identify the gait disorders caused by accidental impairments at multiple anatomical regions using the GaitRec dataset. In our work, machine learning models are trained and tested on the GaitRec dataset, which provides Ground Reaction Force (GRF) data, to analyze an individual’s gait and further classify the gait abnormality (if present) at the specific lower-region portion of the body. The design and implementation of machine learning models are carried out to detect and classify the gait patterns between healthy controls and gait disorders. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed approach is showcased using various qualitative accuracy metrics. The achieved test accuracy is 96% and an F1 score of 95% is obtained in classifying various gait disorders on unseen test samples. The paper concludes by stating how machine learning models can help to detect gait abnormalities along with directions of future work.