Study on Tripping Risks in Fast Walking through Cadence-Controlled Gait Analysis

Fast walking is a common exercise for most people to promote health. However, a higher cadence due to fast walking on ordinary or uneven ground raises the risk of tripping. To investigate the tripping issue, research to observe the gait in fast walking is needed. To explore the relationship between fast gait and the risk of tripping, a gait recording system with a specific synchronization mechanism was developed in this work. The system can acquire gait signals from wearable sensors and action cameras at different cadences. Meanwhile, algorithms for gait cycle segmentation and characteristic extraction were proposed for analyzing a fast gait. In the gait analysis, the correlations of low, moderate, and high cadence in cueing and no cueing gaits were computed, and two results were obtained. First, the higher the cadence is, the larger the motion strength in the terminal foot swing will be and the smaller the motion strength at the starting foot swing. Second, the decreased distance of foot clearance becomes more conspicuous as the cadence increased, especially if one is walking more than 120 beats. The results indicate that fast walking with bigger strides and lower cadence is the best way to maintain safety in moving over ordinary ground.