Center of Mass (CoM) Motions and Foot Placement During Treadmill Walking Using One Time-of-Flight Camera

Area of Science:

• Biomechanics
• Gait Analysis
• Clinical Assessment

Background:

• Assessing patient fall risk in clinical settings is challenging due to space limitations and difficulty connecting traditional tests to biomechanical principles.
• Existing gait stability assessments like the timed-up-and-go test lack direct links to fundamental biomechanical concepts such as the center of mass (CoM) and base of support (BoS) interaction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a rapid, space-efficient, and contactless method for assessing gait stability and fall risk.
• To capture the interplay between the body's center of mass (CoM) and its base of support (BoS) during gait.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a 1.2 m treadmill and a time-of-flight Azure Kinect camera for data acquisition.
• Employed markerless motion capture to determine 20 joint positions, dividing the body into 14 segments to calculate the CoM.
• Tracked CoM and joint positions over consecutive strides to evaluate gait stability metrics.

Main Results:

• Successfully captured the CoM-BoS interplay within a 5-minute timeframe.
• Enabled evaluation of gait stability metrics through stride-to-stride tracking.
• Provided a markerless, contactless, and space-efficient approach to gait analysis.

Conclusions:

• The developed method offers a practical solution for assessing fall risk in constrained clinical environments.
• The collected data on CoM movements relative to foot placement can facilitate future development of AI-driven fall risk identification tools.
• This technique enhances the ability to connect gait performance to fundamental biomechanical principles of stability.