Abstract
This chapter aims to characterize the structural vibrations induced by footsteps to segment a sequence of gait patterns into critical gait phases (including stance phase and swing phase) for in-home gait health monitoring across various floor structures. Gait cycle segmentation is an essential step in quantitative gait assessments for early diagnosis and progressive tracking of neuroskeletal and neuromuscular disorders. Especially, in-home monitoring of peoples’ gait health is beneficial for low-income families and those who have limited access to medical services. Existing studies have adopted cameras, wearable devices, and force plates/pressure mats to segment gait cycles, but they have operational requirements such as direct line-of-sight, carrying devices, and dense deployment, which are not practical for continuous monitoring at an individual’s home. In this chapter, we develop a gait cycle segmentation framework through footstep-induced structural vibrations. The primary research challenges are the complex interplay of the: (1) gait phases and (2) structural properties with the vibration signals. First, gait involves a continuous sequence of multiple types of motions, making it challenging to separate them. Second, people’s living spaces have distinct types of floor structures, leading to difficulty of adapting our framework to multiple structure types. To address the first challenge, we leverage the main insight that human motions at the onset of each gait phase (e.g., heel strike and toe-off) involve unique types of excitation force (e.g., impulsive vs. friction forces). These forces incur peaks at distinct frequency ranges in the responses of the structure. Therefore, we separate gait phases by analyzing the structural responses over various frequency ranges. Second, to make our framework structure-agnostic, we formulate the structural influence on the vibration signals and extract structure-dependent features to represent such influence. Overall, our framework first identifies the structure-dependent dominant frequency ranges for each structure through a time–frequency-domain analysis and extracts vibration signals within these frequency ranges. It then detects time-domain peaks within each structure-dependent frequency range to identify the onset of gait phases. We evaluate our method on two different structures in a real-world setting and achieved consistent results with only a 5% average error in detecting various gait phases.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Davis, B.T., Bryant, B.I., Fritz, S.L., Handlery, R., Flach, A., Hirth, V.A.: Measuring gait parameters from structural vibrations. Measurement 195, 111076 (2022)
Kessler, E., Sriram Malladi, V.V.N., Tarazaga, P.A.: Vibration-based gait analysis via instrumented buildings. Int. J. Distrib. Sensor Netw. 15(10), 1550147719881608 (2019)
Dong, Y., Fagert, J., Zhang, P., Noh, H.Y.: Stranger detection and occupant identification using structural vibrations. In: European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring, pp. 905–914. Springer, Berlin (2023)
Fagert, J., Mirshekari, M., Pan, S., Zhang, P., Noh, H.Y.: Characterizing left-right gait balance using footstep-induced structural vibrations. In: Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2017, vol. 10168, pp. 357–365. SPIE, France (2017)
Dong, Y., Zou, J.J., Liu, J., Fagert, J., Mirshekari, M., Lowes, L., Iammarino, M., Zhang, P., Noh, H.Y.: MD-Vibe: Physics-informed analysis of patient-induced structural vibration data for monitoring gait health in individuals with muscular dystrophy. In: Adjunct Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers, pp. 525–531 (2020)
Pan, S., Berges, M., Rodakowski, J., Zhang, P., Noh, H.Y.: Fine-grained recognition of activities of daily living through structural vibration and electrical sensing. In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation, BuildSys ‘19, pp. 149–158, New York, NY. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2019)
Fagert, J., Bonde, A., Srinidhi, S., Hamilton, S., Zhang, P., Noh, H.Y.: Clean vibes: hand washing monitoring using structural vibration sensing. ACM Trans. Comput. Healthcare 3(3), 1–25 (2022)
Emery, A.E.H.: Population frequencies of inherited neuromuscular diseases–a world survey. Neuromuscul. Dis. 1(1), 19–29 (1991)
Mehta, K.M., Yeo, G.W.: Systematic review of dementia prevalence and incidence in United States race/ethnic populations. Alzheimer’s Dementia 13(1), 72–83 (2017)
Brown, R.C., Lockwood, A.H., Sonawane, B.R.: Neurodegenerative diseases: an overview of environmental risk factors. Environ. Health Perspect. 113(9), 1250–1256 (2005)
Cicirelli, G., Impedovo, D., Dentamaro, V., Marani, R., Pirlo, G., D’Orazio, T.R.: Human gait analysis in neurodegenerative diseases: a review. IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informat. 26(1), 229–242 (2021)
Finkelstein, S.M., Speedie, S.M., Potthoff, S.: Home telehealth improves clinical outcomes at lower cost for home healthcare. Telemed. J. e-Health 12(2), 128–136 (2006)
Naylor, K.B., Tootoo, J., Yakusheva, O., Shipman, S.A., Bynum, J.P., Davis, M.A.: Geographic variation in spatial accessibility of US healthcare providers. PLOS One 14(4), e0215016 (2019)
Andrews, J.G., Davis, M.F., Meaney, F.J.: Correlates of care for young men with Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophy. Muscle Nerve 49(1), 21–25 (2014)
Whittle, M.W.: Gait Analysis: An Introduction. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford (2014)
Stone, E.E., Skubic, M.: Capturing habitual, in-home gait parameter trends using an inexpensive depth camera. In: 2012 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pp. 5106–5109. IEEE, Piscataway (2012)
De Rossi, S.M., Crea, S., Donati, M., Reberšek, P., Novak, D., Vitiello, N., Lenzi, T., Podobnik, J., Munih, M., Carrozza, M.C.: Gait segmentation using bipedal foot pressure patterns. In: 2012 4th IEEE RAS & EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob), pp. 361–366. IEEE, Piscataway (2012)
Mohammed, S., Same, A., Oukhellou, L., Kong, K., Huo, W., Amirat, Y.: Recognition of gait cycle phases using wearable sensors. Robot. Auton. Syst. 75, 50–59 (2016)
Agostini, V., Balestra, G., Knaflitz, M.: Segmentation and classification of gait cycles. IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehabil. Eng. 22(5), 946–952 (2013)
Dong, Y., Liu, J., Noh, H.Y.: GaitVibe+: Enhancing structural vibration-based footstep localization using temporary cameras for in-home gait analysis. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Continual and Multimodal Learning for Internet of Things (CML-IOT), New York, NY. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2022)
Fagert, J., Mirshekari, M., Pan, S., Zhang, P., Noh, H.Y.: Structural property guided gait parameter estimation using footstep-induced floor vibrations. In: Dynamics of Civil Structures, vol. 2, pp. 191–194. Springer, Berlin (2020)
Pan, S., Ramirez, C.G., Mirshekari, M., Fagert, J., Chung, A.J., Hu, C.C., Shen, J.P., Noh, H.Y., Zhang, P.: SurfaceVibe: Vibration-based tap & swipe tracking on ubiquitous surfaces. In: 2017 16th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pp. 197–208 (2017)
Persson, B.N.J.: Sliding Friction: Physical Principles and Applications. Springer Science & Business Media, Berlin (2013)
Whittle, M.W.: Generation and attenuation of transient impulsive forces beneath the foot: a review. Gait Posture 10(3), 264–275 (1999)
Hahm, K.S., Anthony, B.W.: In-home health monitoring using floor-based gait tracking. Int. Things 19, 100541 (2022)
Kharb, A., Saini, V., Jain, Y.K., Dhiman, S.: A review of gait cycle and its parameters. IJCEM Int. J. Comput. Eng. Manag. 13, 78–83 (2011)
Tugui, R.D., Antonescu, D.: Cerebral palsy gait, clinical importance. Maedica 8(4), 388 (2013)
Mirshekari, M., Fagert, J., Pan, S., Zhang, P., Noh, H.Y.: Step-level occupant detection across different structures through footstep-induced floor vibration using model transfer. J. Eng. Mech. 146(3), 04019137 (2020)
Zhang, Y., Zhizhang, H., Susu, X., Pan, S.: AutoQual: task-oriented structural vibration sensing quality assessment leveraging co-located mobile sensing context. CCF Trans. Pervasive Comput. Interact. 3(4), 378–396 (2021)
Dong, Y., Zhu, J., Noh, H.Y.: Re-vibe: Vibration-based indoor person re-identification through cross-structure optimal transport. In: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on the Future of Work, Workplaces, and Smart Buildings (FoWSB’22), New York, NY. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2022)
Caprani, Colin C., Ahmadi, Ehsan: Formulation of human-structure interaction system models for vertical vibration. Journal of Sound and Vibration 377, 346–367 (2016)
Racic, V., Pavic, A., Brownjohn, J.M.W.: Experimental identification and analytical modelling of human walking forces: literature review. J. Sound Vibrat. 326(1–2), 1–49 (2009)
Oppenheim, A.V., Buck, J., Daniel, M., Willsky, A.S., Nawab, S.H., Singer, A.: Signals & Systems. Pearson Educación, London (1997)
Chopra, A.K.: Dynamics of Structures. Pearson Education India, Noida (2007)
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (under grant number NSF-CMMI-2026699).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc.
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dong, Y., Noh, H.Y. (2024). Structure-Agnostic Gait Cycle Segmentation for In-Home Gait Health Monitoring Through Footstep-Induced Structural Vibrations. In: Noh, H.Y., Whelan, M., Harvey, P.S. (eds) Dynamics of Civil Structures, Volume 2. SEM 2023. Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36663-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36663-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-36662-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-36663-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)