Predicting Individualized Joint Kinematics Over Continuous Variations of Walking, Running, and Stair Climbing

<italic>Goal:</italic> Accounting for gait individuality is important to positive outcomes with wearable robots, but manually tuning multi-activity models is time-consuming and not viable in a clinic. Generalizations can possibly be made to predict gait individuality in unobserved condit...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Emma Reznick, Cara Gonzalez Welker, Robert D. Gregg
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2022-01-01
Series:IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10006886/
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Summary:<italic>Goal:</italic> Accounting for gait individuality is important to positive outcomes with wearable robots, but manually tuning multi-activity models is time-consuming and not viable in a clinic. Generalizations can possibly be made to predict gait individuality in unobserved conditions. <italic>Methods:</italic> Kinematic individuality&#x2014;how one person&#x0027;s joint angles differ from the group&#x2014;is quantified for every subject, joint, ambulation mode (walking, running, stair ascent, and stair descent), and intramodal task (speed, incline) in an open-access dataset with 10 able-bodied subjects. Four N-way ANOVAs test how prediction methods affect the fit to experimental data between and within ambulation modes. We test whether walking individuality (measured at a single speed on level ground) carries across modes, or whether a mode-specific prediction (based on a single task for each mode) is significantly more effective. <italic>Results:</italic> Kinematic individualization improves fit across joint and task if we consider each mode separately. Across all modes, tasks, and joints, modal individualization improved the fit in 81&#x0025; of trials, improving the fit on average by 4.3<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${}^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula> across the gait cycle. This was statistically significant at all joints for walking and running, and half the joints for stair ascent/descent. <italic>Conclusions:</italic> For walking and running, kinematic individuality can be easily generalized within mode, but the trends are mixed on stairs depending on joint.
ISSN:2644-1276