An inertial sensor based balance and gait analysis system

Time-up and Go Test (TUGT) is a common clinical motility test for the elderly. Currently it is measured manually, which is human resource consuming, less accurate, and limited in capability of measuring sophisticated parameters. In this paper, we propose a system consisting of three inertial-sensor-based measuring components, a remote controller, and an analysis software for automatic balance and gait analysis in TUGT. This system is designed to be of easy use with the software automatically measuring the time intervals of stand-up time, sit-down time, and the total time of test. In addition, the system can also obtain the gait information of stride time, swing time, and stance time. To validate the system, we compared the performance with that obtained from stopwatch using videos as the gold standard. The results indicate that the system not only provides a convenient way of measurement but also achieves higher accurate and reliable measurement results than using stopwatch. We use this system to compare the Alzheimer's disease patients (ADs) with health controllers (HCs). The results show that the ADs need longer stand-up time, sit-down time, and total time while taking the TUGT compared to the HCs. The stride time, swing time, and stance time are also longer than the HCs'. Such a friendly system provides high potential in tracking long-time patterns for diagnosis.