3D Gait Tracking by Acoustic Doppler Effects

Rehabilitation and physical therapies can recover people suffering from neurological disorder. Due to limited medical personnels, there are not enough medical personnels help patients with their posture diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a 3D gait tracking method to help medical personnels monitor patients. Based on acoustic signals, our approach derives displacement by only one integration of velocity. When one walks, his feet move back and forth, causing relative movements to our acoustic sensors, which we call self-Doppler effect. We utilize three buzzers and one microphone mounted on feet to collect the frequency shifts caused by relative movements and measure 3D trajectories. We validate through simulations that this approach would perform very well. In real experiments, due to the existence of noise and the limitation of hardware, we observe an average error of 0.1669 m in step length estimation and 0.0867 m in step height estimation.