Development of Tactile Sensor-Based Instrumented Treadmill

Abstract

Gait analysis is vital because deviations from normal walking patterns can indicate potential abnormalities or diseases. In the past, gait evaluation relied on visual observation; however, due to low inter-rater reliability and a heavy dependence on clinical expertise, instrumented gait analysis has been proposed as an alternative. Various systems have been developed and studied to measure and analyze gait parameters quantitatively. However, well-known commercial gait analysis systems with high accuracy are often expensive or require the attachment of sensors to the body. To address these limitations, vision-based systems have been introduced; however, they tend to show reduced accuracy in certain parameters such as step length and step width. In this study, we propose a tactile sensor-based treadmill system that was specifically developed to enable low-cost measurement of spatial gait parameters without the need for any wearable sensors. To validate the accuracy of the proposed system, a pilot test was conducted using an infrared marker-based motion capture system for comparison. Experimental results demonstrate that our system achieved improved performance in a step width measurement compared to previous studies. In future work, we aim to validate the system with a larger participant pool and enhance its precision by integrating methods such as artificial intelligence or multi-sensor fusion.