Changes in gait patterns provide important information about individuals’ health. To perform sensor based gait analysis, it is crucial to develop methodologies to automatically segment single strides from continuous movement sequences. In this study we developed an algorithm based on time-invariant template matching to isolate strides from inertial sensor signals. Shoe-mounted gyroscopes and accelerometers were used to record gait data from 40 elderly controls, 15 patients with Parkinson’s disease and 15 geriatric patients. Each stride was manually labeled from a straight 40 m walk test and from a video monitored free walk sequence. A multi-dimensional subsequence Dynamic Time Warping (msDTW) approach was used to search for patterns matching a pre-defined stride template constructed from 25 elderly controls. F-measure of 98% (recall 98%, precision 98%) for 40 m walk tests and of 97% (recall 97%, precision 97%) for free walk tests were obtained for the three groups. Compared to conventional peak detection methods up to 15% F-measure improvement was shown. The msDTW proved to be robust for segmenting strides from both standardized gait tests and free walks. This approach may serve as a platform for individualized stride segmentation during activities of daily living.

New smart technologies and the internet of things increasingly play a key role in healthcare and wellness, contributing to the development of novel healthcare concepts. These technologies enable a comprehensive view of an individual’s movement and mobility, potentially supporting healthy living as well as complementing medical diagnostics and the monitoring of therapeutic outcomes. This overview article specifically addresses smart shoes, which are becoming one such smart technology within the future internet of health things, since the ability to walk defines large aspects of quality of life in a wide range of health and disease conditions. Smart shoes offer the possibility to support prevention, diagnostic work-up, therapeutic decisions, and individual disease monitoring with a continuous assessment of gait and mobility. This overview article provides the technological as well as medical aspects of smart shoes within this rising area of digital health applications, and is designed especially for the novel reader in this specific field. It also stresses the need for closer interdisciplinary interactions between technological and medical experts to bridge the gap between research and practice. Smart shoes can be envisioned to serve as pervasive wearable computing systems that enable innovative solutions and services for the promotion of healthy living and the transformation of health care.

The purpose of this study was to assess the concurrent validity and test–retest reliability of a sensor-based gait analysis system. Eleven healthy subjects and four Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients were asked to complete gait tasks whilst wearing two inertial measurement units at their feet. The extracted spatio-temporal parameters of 1166 strides were compared to those extracted from a reference camera-based motion capture system concerning concurrent validity. Test–retest reliability was assessed for five healthy subjects at three different days in a two week period. The two systems were highly correlated for all gait parameters ( $r>0.93$ ). The bias for stride time was $0\pm 16$ ms and for stride length was $1.4\pm 6.7$ cm. No systematic range dependent errors were observed and no significant changes existed between healthy subjects and PD patients. Test-retest reliability was excellent for all parameters (intraclass correlation (ICC) > 0.81) except for gait velocity (ICC > 0.55). The sensor-based system was able to accurately capture spatio-temporal gait parameters as compared to the reference camera-based system for normal and impaired gait. The system’s high retest reliability renders the use in recurrent clinical measurements and in long-term applications feasible.

Physical mobility is essential to health, and patients often rate it as a high-priority clinical outcome. Digital mobility outcomes (DMOs), such as real-world gait speed or step count, show promise as clinical measures in many medical conditions. However, current research is nascent and fragmented by discipline. This scoping review maps existing evidence on the clinical utility of DMOs, identifying commonalities across traditional disciplinary divides. In November 2019, 11 databases were searched for records investigating the validity and responsiveness of 34 DMOs in four diverse medical conditions (Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hip fracture). Searches yielded 19,672 unique records. After screening, 855 records representing 775 studies were included and charted in systematic maps. Studies frequently investigated gait speed (70.4% of studies), step length (30.7%), cadence (21.4%), and daily step count (20.7%). They studied differences between healthy and pathological gait (36.4%), associations between DMOs and clinical measures (48.8%) or outcomes (4.3%), and responsiveness to interventions (26.8%). Gait speed, step length, cadence, step time and step count exhibited consistent evidence of validity and responsiveness in multiple conditions, although the evidence was inconsistent or lacking for other DMOs. If DMOs are to be adopted as mainstream tools, further work is needed to establish their predictive validity, responsiveness, and ecological validity. Cross-disciplinary efforts to align methodology and validate DMOs may facilitate their adoption into clinical practice.

Digital technologies provide the opportunity to analyze gait patterns in patients with Parkinson’s Disease using wearable sensors in clinical settings and a home environment. Confirming the technical validity of inertial sensors with a 3D motion capture system is a necessary step for the clinical application of sensor-based gait analysis. Therefore, the objective of this study was to compare gait parameters measured by a mobile sensor-based gait analysis system and a motion capture system as the gold standard. Gait parameters of 37 patients were compared between both systems after performing a standardized 5 × 10 m walking test by reliability analysis using intra-class correlation and Bland–Altman plots. Additionally, gait parameters of an age-matched healthy control group (n = 14) were compared to the Parkinson cohort. Gait parameters representing bradykinesia and short steps showed excellent reliability (ICC > 0.96). Shuffling gait parameters reached ICC > 0.82. In a stridewise synchronization, no differences were observed for gait speed, stride length, stride time, relative stance and swing time (p > 0.05). In contrast, heel strike, toe off and toe clearance significantly differed between both systems (p < 0.01). Both gait analysis systems distinguish Parkinson patients from controls. Our results indicate that wearable sensors generate valid gait parameters compared to the motion capture system and can consequently be used for clinically relevant gait recordings in flexible environments.

Robust gait segmentation is the basis for mobile gait analysis. A range of methods have been applied and evaluated for gait segmentation of healthy and pathological gait bouts. However, a unified evaluation of gait segmentation methods in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is missing. In this paper, we compare four prevalent gait segmentation methods in order to reveal their strengths and drawbacks in gait processing. We considered peak detection from event-based methods, two variations of dynamic time warping from template matching methods, and hierarchical hidden Markov models (hHMMs) from machine learning methods. To evaluate the methods, we included two supervised and instrumented gait tests that are widely used in the examination of Parkinsonian gait. In the first experiment, a sequence of strides from instructed straight walks was measured from 10 PD patients. In the second experiment, a more heterogeneous assessment paradigm was used from an additional 34 PD patients, including straight walks and turning strides as well as non-stride movements. The goal of the latter experiment was to evaluate the methods in challenging situations including turning strides and non-stride movements. Results showed no significant difference between the methods for the first scenario, in which all methods achieved an almost 100% accuracy in terms of F-score. Hence, we concluded that in the case of a predefined and homogeneous sequence of strides, all methods can be applied equally. However, in the second experiment the difference between methods became evident, with the hHMM obtaining a 96% F-score and significantly outperforming the other methods. The hHMM also proved promising in distinguishing between strides and non-stride movements, which is critical for clinical gait analysis. Our results indicate that both the instrumented test procedure and the required stride segmentation algorithm have to be selected adequately in order to support and complement classical clinical examination by sensor-based movement assessment.