Challenges of Stride Segmentation and Their Implementation for Impaired Gait

Stride segmentation represents important but challenging part of the gait analysis. Different methods and sensor systems have been proposed for detection of markers for segmentation of gait sequences. This task is often performed with wearable sensors comprising force sensors and/or inertial sensors. In this paper, we have compared four different methods for stride segmentation based on signals collected from force sensing resistors, accelerometers and gyro sensors. The results were evaluated on 15 healthy and 15 patients with Parkinson's disease, and expressed in terms of number of imprecisely, missed or wrongly detected gait events, as well as temporal absolute error. It was established that the methods using the inertial data, provide results with up to 12% higher error rate comparing to detection from force sensing resistors.