A Lightweight Pose Sensing Scheme for Contactless Abnormal Gait Behavior Measurement

The recognition of abnormal gait behavior is important in the field of motion assessment and disease diagnosis. Currently, abnormal gait behavior is primarily recognized by pressure and inertial data obtained from wearable sensors. However, the data drift and wearing difficulties for patients have impeded the application of these wearable sensors. Here, we propose a contactless abnormal gait behavior recognition method that captures human pose data using a monocular camera. A lightweight OpenPose (OP) model is generated with Depthwise Separable Convolution to recognize joint points and extract their coordinates during walking in real time. For the walking data errors extracted in the 2D plane, a 3D reconstruction is performed on the walking data, and a total of 11 types of abnormal gait features are extracted by the OP model. Finally, the XGBoost algorithm is used for feature screening. The final experimental results show that the Random Forest (RF) algorithm in combination with 3D features delivers the highest precision (92.13%) for abnormal gait behavior recognition. The proposed scheme overcomes the data drift of inertial sensors and sensor wearing challenges in the elderly while reducing the hardware requirements for model deployment. With excellent real-time and contactless capabilities, the scheme is expected to enjoy a wide range of applications in the field of abnormal gait measurement.