Vision-Based Gait Analysis for Senior Care
This work addresses the need for non-intrusive, cost-effective health monitoring for the rapidly growing senior population, though it is incremental as it builds on existing smart home and gait analysis technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of monitoring seniors' mobility and health risks by developing a vision-based gait analysis system using a single camera in senior homes, achieving accurate calculation of various gait parameters to aid clinicians.
As the senior population rapidly increases, it is challenging yet crucial to provide effective long-term care for seniors who live at home or in senior care facilities. Smart senior homes, which have gained widespread interest in the healthcare community, have been proposed to improve the well-being of seniors living independently. In particular, non-intrusive, cost-effective sensors placed in these senior homes enable gait characterization, which can provide clinically relevant information including mobility level and early neurodegenerative disease risk. In this paper, we present a method to perform gait analysis from a single camera placed within the home. We show that we can accurately calculate various gait parameters, demonstrating the potential for our system to monitor the long-term gait of seniors and thus aid clinicians in understanding a patient's medical profile.