A comparison of machine learning classifiers for smartphone-based gait analysis

This paper proposes a reliable monitoring scheme that can assist medical specialists in watching over the patient’s condition. Although several technologies are traditionally used to acquire motion data of patients, the high costs as well as the large spaces they require make them difficult to be applied in a home context for rehabilitation. A reliable patient monitoring technique, which can automatically record and classify patient movements, is mandatory for a telemedicine protocol. In this paper, a comparison of several state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers is proposed, where stride data are collected by using a smartphone. The main goal is to identify a robust methodology able to assure a suited classification of gait movements, in order to allow the monitoring of patients in time as well as to discriminate among a pathological and physiological gait. Additionally, the advantages of smartphones of being compact, cost-effective and relatively easy to operate make these devices particularly suited for home-based rehabilitation programs. [Figure: see text]