Gait Analysis Insole
Smart Insole is a wearable safety tool designed to spot dangerous walking surfaces before injuries occur. Instead of depending solely on safety staff to monitor large worksites, this system uses workers’ natural walking patterns to detect slip and trip risks automatically. By analyzing how gait changes on unsafe flooring, the device identifies hazardous areas with machine-learning intelligence and distinguishes unsafe surfaces with over 98% accuracy. This approach turns every worker into a real-time safety sensor, helping prevent falls and reduce costs related to workplace injuries.
Project Description
Falls are leading causes of nonfatal injuries in workplaces which lead to substantial injury and economic consequences. To help avoid fall injuries, safety managers usually need to inspect working areas routinely. However, it is difficult for a limited number of safety managers to inspect fall hazards instantly especially in large workplaces. To address this problem, a novel fall hazard identification method is proposed in this paper which makes it possible for all workers to report the potential hazards automatically. This method is based on the fact that people use different gaits to get across different floor surfaces. Through analyzing gait patterns, potential fall hazards could be identified automatically. In this research, Smart Insole, an insole shaped wearable system for gait analysis, was applied to measure gait patterns for fall hazard identification. Slips and trips are the focus of this study since they are two main causes of falls in workplaces. Five effective gait features were extracted to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model for recognizing slip hazard, trip hazard, and safe floor surfaces. Experiment results showed that fall hazards could be recognized with high accuracy (98.1%).
System Overiew
Publication
mHealth Technologies Toward Active Health Information Collection and Tracking in Daily Life: A Dynamic Gait Monitoring Example
Yi Cai, Xiaoye Qian, Huiyi Cao, Jianian Zheng, Wenyao Xu, Ming-Chun Huang
PI Leads
Prof. Ming-Chun Huang
Associate Professor, Duke Kunshan University
Contributors
Prof. Wenyao Xu
Professor, University at Buffalo
Prof. Diliang Chen
Assistant Professor, University of New Hampshire