A single RGB camera based gait analysis with a mobile tele-robot for healthcare

With the increasing awareness of high-quality life, there is a growing need for health monitoring devices running robust algorithms in home environment. Health monitoring technologies enable real-time analysis of users’ health status, offering long-term healthcare support and reducing hospitalization time. The propose of this work is twofold, the software focuses on the analysis of gait, which is widely adopted for joint correction and assessing any lower limb, or spinal problem. On the hardware side, a novel marker-less gait analysis device using a low-cost RGB camera mounted on a mobile tele-robot is designed. As gait analysis with a single camera is much more challenging compared to previous works utilizing multi-cameras, a RGB-D camera or wearable sensors, we propose using vision-based human pose estimation approaches. More specifically, based on the out-put of state-of-the-art human pose estimation models, we devise measurements for four bespoke gait parameters: inversion/eversion, dorsiflexion/plantarflexion, ankle and foot progression angles. We thereby classify walking patterns into normal, supination, pronation and limp. We also illustrate how to run the proposed machine learning models in low-resource environments such as a single entry-level CPU. Experiments show that our single RGB camera method achieves competitive performance compared to multi-camera motion capture systems, at smaller hardware costs