A Review on Wearable Inertial Tracking based Human Gait Analysis and Control Strategies of Lower-Limb Exoskeletons

Human gait analysis has become an active area of research from the past few decades due to its applications in the fields of medicine, sports and identification of people for security reasons. It gained a huge popularity in medical field as it provides key information about person’s quality of life. It gives reliable information about the evolution of different diseases such as stroke, Parkinson’s and cardiopathies. The effects due to ageing in elderly people can be monitored through gait analysis. The technologies used for gait analysis can be classified as wearable or non-wearable sensors. Non-wearable sensors require the use of controlled research facilities where movements are captured by camera based analysis systems and ground contact forces are recorded by floor sensors. Camera based systems can provide three-dimensional position of the body segments. The limitations of these non-wearable sensors entail high setup cost and are restricted to laboratory environment. Also, it is difficult for the subjects to visit the lab more frequently. This provides motivation to develop sensors which are of low cost, portable and not restricted to the indoors. Recent advancements in MEMS technology paved a way to develop these types of sensors.