iGAIT: an interactive accelerometer based gait analysis system

This paper presents a software program (iGAIT) developed in MATLAB, for the analysis of gait patterns extracted from accelerometer recordings. iGAIT provides a user-friendly graphical interface to display and analyse gait acceleration data recorded by an accelerometer attached to the lower back of subjects. The core function of iGAIT is gait feature extraction, which can be used to derive 31 features from acceleration data, including 6 spatio-temporal features, 7 regularity and symmetry features, and 18 spectral features. Features extracted are summarised and displayed on screen, as well as an option to be stored in text files for further review or analysis if required. Another unique feature of iGAIT is that it provides interactive functionality allowing users to manually adjust the analysis process according to their requirements. The system has been tested under Window XP, Vista and Window 7 using three different types of accelerometer data. It is designed for analysis of accelerometer data recorded with sample frequencies ranging from 5 Hz to 200 Hz.