Gait event detection for FES using accelerometers and supervised machine learning

Rule based detectors were used with a single cluster of accelerometers attached to the shank for the real time detection of the main phases of normal gait during walking. The gait phase detectors were synthesized from two rule induction algorithms, Rough Sets (RS) and Adaptive Logic Networks (ALNs), and compared with to a previously reported stance/swing detector based on a hand crafted, rule based algorithm. Data was sampled at 100 Hz and the detection errors determined at each sample for 50 steps. For three able bodied subjects, the sample by sample accuracy of stance/swing detection ranged within 94-97%, 87-94%, and 87-95% for the RS, ALN, and the handcrafted methods, respectively. A heuristically formulated postdetector filter improved the RS and ALN detectors' accuracy to 98%. RS and ALN also detected five gait phases to an overall accuracy of 82-89% and 86-91%, respectively. The postdetector filter localized the errors to the phase transitions, but did not change the detection accuracy. The average duration of the error at each transition was 40 ms and 23 ms for RS and ALN, respectively. When implemented on a microcontroller, the RS-based detector executed ten times faster and required one tenth of the memory than the ALN-based detector.