Tracking and Analysis of Ecological Human Walking With Wearable Sensors

Gait studies performed in a laboratory setting might not fully represent real-life walking. Walking under constrained conditions, such as fixed speed or distance, can alter a person's gait. Humans often walk relatively short bouts that lack a steady speed, and longer bouts of varying movement vigor, meaning speed depends on the urgency of the task and who is performing it. Real world environments also contain diverse terrains that must be traversed. Thus, human walking in free-living conditions includes a wide range of gait parameters that may not be well-represented in laboratory studies. This project has three main parts. In the first, we quantify gait characteristics such as stride length, speed, and height, in young, healthy subjects (N = 11) in their everyday lives for seven days. Subjects take the majority of steps as part of short, variable walking bouts, and though they have a preferred speed, their actual stride speed is highly dependent on task. The second section expands the study to include a group of older adults (N = 14) for an investigation of how age affects gait. The older subjects have a similar preferred walking speed to the younger subjects, but also take more strides at a slower speed. For both groups, stride length increases with speed in a similar relationship to that studied in a lab. Finally, we show that speeds and durations of short walking bouts can be explained by a general objective for energy and time, defined as the total work or energy expended to reach destination, plus a subjective cost proportional to bout duration. This objective is both applied to a model and tested on humans (N = 10). Speed trajectories for short walking bouts resemble an inverted U, where shorter bouts only briefly peak in speed, in amounts increasing with bout distance. Speeds of any distance increase with an individual's subjective cost of time, which may differ between individuals, but in a systematic and scalable way. The Energy-Time cost for a task quantitatively predicts transient, steady, and vigor-related aspects of movement.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (MSc)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Engineering – Biomedical

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Schulich School of Engineering

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Carlisle, Rebecca Elizabeth

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kuo, Arthur

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Condliffe, Elizabeth
• Manocha, Ranita
• Bertram, John
• Pfau, Thilo

Statement dc:rights

• University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/40162

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/115126