Gait measurement and evaluation system for diagnosis of elderly people's gait condition to prevent fall

Recently, the population ratio of elderly people is increasing rapidly and so, to improve the QOL of elderly people is a today's important social issue. Most urgent problem is how to prevent the gradual decrease of the walking ability and how to prevent ‘fall down’. In clinical gait analysis, a quantitative and effective evaluation of a human lower limb movement is very important in order to provide an appropriate exercise and rehabilitation program which matches the individual walking condition. Therefore, we have proposed a “Gait measurement and evaluation system” which can be applied for clinical gait analysis. In this paper, we conducted gait measurement and diagnosis experiments for elderly people who attended the preventive care class in aged welfare facilities in order to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system and to investigate the factor of elderly people's fall. In the experiments, we investigated the year-by-year improvement/deterioration of elderly people's gait condition and also analyzed the striding movement over a virtual obstacle to reveal the differences of the individual walking performance. The experimental results illustrate the validity of the propose approach.