Instrumented gait assessment with a single wearable: an introductory tutorial

Gait is a powerful tool to identify ageing and track disease progression. Yet, its measurement via traditional instrumentations remains restricted to the laboratory or bespoke clinical facilities. The potential for that to change is due to the advances in wearable technology where the synergy between accelerometer-based body worn monitors and smart algorithms has provided the potential of ‘a gait lab on a chip’. The deployment of wearables can allow the researcher/clinician to continuously assess the participant accurately and robustly over time. Commercially available wearables for gait quantification remain expensive and are restricted to a limited number of characteristics unsuitable for a comprehensive clinical assessment. However, the increasing demand for low cost diagnostics has fuelled the shift in how health-related resources are distributed. As such the interest in open platform technology and novel research methodologies has begun to harmonise engineering solutions with clinical needs. We provide an introduction to conduct an instrumented gait assessment with a discrete, low cost, accelerometer-based body worn monitor. We show that the capture and interpretation of raw gait signals with a common scripting language (MATLAB®) can be straightforward. In addition, we highlight best approaches and hope that this will help compliment any analytical tool-kit as part of any modern clinical assessment