Date of Award

2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Chemical and Biomedical Engineering

First Advisor

van den Bogert, Antonie

Subject Headings

Human locomotion, Gait in humans, Accelerometers, Musculoskeletal system, Kinematics, Biomedical Engineering

Abstract

Gait analysis is the quantification of locomotion. Understanding the science behind the way we move is of interest to a wide variety of fields. Medical professionals might use gait analysis to track the rehabilitation progress of a patient. An engineer may want to design wearable robotics to augment a human operator. Use cases even extend into the sport and entertainment industries. Typically, a gait analysis is performed in a highly specialized laboratory containing cumbersome expensive equipment. The process is tedious and requires specially trained operators. Continued development of small and cheap inertial measurement units (IMUs) over an alternative to current methods of gait analysis. These devices are portable and simple to use allowing gait analysis to be done outside the laboratory in real world environments. Unfortunately, while current IMU based gait analysis systems are able to quantify a subject's joint kinematics they are unable to measure joint kinetics as could be done in a traditional gait laboratory. A novel musculoskeletal model-based movement analysis system using accelerometers has been developed that can calculate both joint kinematics and joint kinetics. The aim of this master's thesis is to validate this accelerometer based gait analysis against the industry standard optical motion capture gait analysis

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