Human Walking Analysis, Evaluation and Classification Based on Motion Capture System

Gait analysis is the systematic study of human walking. It is helpful in the medical management of those diseases which affect the locomotion systems. Recently, the gait motion capture systems are becoming widely used by doctors and physical therapists for kinematics analysis and biomechanics and motion capture research, sports medicine and physical therapy, including human gait analysis and injury rehabilitation. This chapter describes some new progress on human walking analysis that our group made in the past few years based on motion capture system. Generally, ageing causes many changes to neuromuscular system of a human being, for an example, his walking capabilities degenerate by ageing. Because these changes sometimes result in an increase the number of falls during daily walking, especially after the age of 75, it is very important to study the age related changes in the walking gait of elderly subjects. Many researchers studied stability of human walking gait and it was quoted that human walking gait stability decreases with age increasing the risk of falls in elderly people. Many studies have been reported about the change in the kinematics parameters with age (Arif et al., 2004). This paper only focuses on the progress of walking modeling and walking stability. Especially, in order to simplify the method of data acquisition, this paper suggests process of reduction on dynamic stability features through feature selection. That will help us analyze stability in a more clear way.