Behnam Malmir

Behnam Malmir

This research aims to quantify human walking patterns through depth cameras to (1) detect walking pattern changes of a person with and without a motion-restricting device or a walking aid, and to (2) identify distinct walking patterns from different persons of similar physical attributes. Microsoft Kinect devices, often used for video games, were used to provide and track coordinates of 25 different joints of people over time to form a human skeleton. Then multiple machine learning (ML) models were applied to the SE datasets from ten college-age subjects - five males and five females. In particular, ML models were applied to classify subjects into two categories: normal walking and abnormal walking (i.e. with motion-restricting devices). The best ML model (K-nearest neighborhood) was able to predict 97.3% accuracy using 10-fold cross-validation. Finally, ML models were applied to classify five gait conditions: walking normally, walking while wearing the ankle brace, walking while wearing the ACL brace, walking while using a cane, and walking while using a walker. The best ML model was again the K-nearest neighborhood performing at 98.7% accuracy rate.

Behnam Malmir, Shing I Chang, Malgorzata Rys et al.

This study describes a method to quantify potential gait changes in human subjects. Microsoft Kinect devices were used to provide and track coordinates of fifteen different joints of a subject over time. Three male subjects walk a 10-foot path multiple times with and without motion-restricting devices. Their walking patterns were recorded via two Kinect devices through frontal and sagittal planes. A modified sample entropy (SE) value was computed to quantify the variability of the time series for each joint. The SE values with and without motion-restricting devices were used to compare the changes in each joint. The preliminary results of the experiments show that the proposed quantification method can detect differences in walking patterns with and without motion-restricting devices. The proposed method has the potential to be applied to track personal progress in physical therapy sessions.