Gait assessment using the Kinect RGB-D sensor

Abstract

Patients with concussions, strokes and neuromuscular disease such as Parkinson's disease, often have difficulties in keeping balance and suffer from abnormal gaits. Gait assessment conducted by a physician or therapist in clinics is standard clinical practice for assessing such injuries. However, this approach is subjective, leading to potential problems of unrepeatability, poor sensitivity and unreliability. To conduct the assessment in an objective way, a computer-based gait assessment system is designed and presented in this paper. The system performs assessments on dynamic balance and gaits by analyzing the skeleton frames of a subject captured by the Microsoft Kinect RGB-D sensor. Results show that the proposed system effectively scores subjects.