GaitVibe+: Enhancing Structural Vibration-based Footstep Localization Using Temporary Cameras for In-home Gait Analysis

TL;DR

GaitVibe+ combines initial camera-based calibration with vibration sensors to accurately localize footsteps in-home, enabling privacy-preserving gait analysis with minimal calibration and high spatial accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a two-stage method that fuses temporary camera data with vibration sensing to improve footstep localization without continuous camera use.

Findings

Achieved an average localization error of 0.22 meters.

Reduced spatial gait parameter error from 111% to 27%.

Validated effectiveness through 50 real-world walking trials.

Abstract

In-home gait analysis is important for providing early diagnosis and adaptive treatments for individuals with gait disorders. Existing systems include wearables and pressure mats, but they have limited scalability. Recent studies have developed vision-based systems to enable scalable, accurate in-home gait analysis, but it faces privacy concerns due to the exposure of people's appearances. Our prior work developed footstep-induced structural vibration sensing for gait monitoring, which is device-free, wide-ranged, and perceived as more privacy-friendly. Although it has succeeded in temporal gait event extraction, it shows limited performance for spatial gait parameter estimation due to imprecise footstep localization. In particular, the localization error mainly comes from the estimation error of the wave arrival time at the vibration sensors and its error propagation to wave velocity estimations. Therefore, we present GaitVibe+, a vibration-based footstep localization method fused with temporarily installed cameras for in-home gait analysis. Our method has two stages: fusion and operating. In the fusion stage, both cameras and vibration sensors are installed to record only a few trials of the subject's footstep data, through which we characterize the uncertainty in wave arrival time and model the wave velocity profiles for the given structure. In the operating stage, we remove the camera to preserve privacy at home. The footstep localization is conducted by estimating the time difference of arrival (TDoA) over multiple vibration sensors, whose accuracy is improved through the reduced uncertainty and velocity modeling during the fusion stage. We evaluate GaitVibe+ through a real-world experiment with 50 walking trials. With only 3 trials of multi-modal fusion, our approach has an average localization error of 0.22 meters, which reduces the spatial gait parameter error from 111% to 27%.