CaneFitter: investigation on appropriate cane selection and proper cane use for the elderly

With the aging population, the demand of canes to support independent living of the elderly has greatly emerged. However, most elders with canes have never been instructed on the proper use and often have inappropriate devices. This work presents CaneFitter, a cane fitting system that consists of two major components: 1) recommendation module, which generates adaptive recommendations on better fitting canes based on the efficient gait analysis technique; 2) teaching module, where the image of an elderly user segmented from the live video is merged with the training video, allowing the user to learn the cane use in an immersive augmented virtual environment. Also, the user is adaptively instructed to correct their postures by using automatic posture matching techniques. We deploy CaneFitter in an elderly community and collect constructive feedback for further system improvement.