Chapter 2
Video-Based Monitoring and Analytics
of Human Gait for Companion Robot
Xinyi Liu, Md Imran Sarker, Mariofanna Milanova,
and Lawrence O’Gorman
Abstract Human gait is essential for long-term health monitoring as it reflects phys-
ical and neurological aspects of a person’s health status. In this paper, we propose a
non-invasive video-based gait analysis system to detect abnormal gait, and record gait
and postural parameters framework on a day-to-day basis. It takes videos captured
from a single camera mounted on a robot as input. Open Pose, a deep learning-
based 2D pose estimator is used to localize skeleton and joints in each frame. Angles
of body parts form multivariate time series. Then, we employ time series analysis
for normal and abnormal gait classification. Dynamic time warping (DTW)-based
support vector machine (SVM)-based classification module is proposed and devel-
oped. We classify normal and abnormal gait by characterizing subjects’ gait pattern
and measuring deviation from their normal gait. In the experiment, we capture videos
of our volunteers showing normal gait as well as simulated abnormal gait to vali-
date the proposed methods. From the gait and postural parameters, we observe a
distinction between normal and abnormal gait groups. It shows that by recording and
tracking these parameters, we can quantitatively analyze body posture. People can
see on the display results of the evaluation after walking through a camera mounted
on a companion robot.
X. Liu · M. I. Sarker · M. Milanova (B )
University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, USA
e-mail: mgmilanova@ualr.edu
X. Liu
e-mail: xxliu8@ualr.edu
M. I. Sarker
e-mail: misarker@ualr.edu
L. O’Gorman
Nokia Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ, USA
e-mail: larry.o_gorman@nokia-bell-labs.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
R. Kountchev et al. (eds.), New Approaches for Multidimensional Signal Processing,
Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies 216,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4676-5_2
15