Walking Stability by Age A Feature Analysis Based on a Fourteen-Linkage Model

More and more researchers have been interested in walking analysis for health management of elderly people. Before understanding pathological gait, it is necessary to understand normal gait, since this provides a quantitative standard to judge or evaluate the gait of a patient. A starting point to do this is to study the relationship between walking features and ages. For this purpose, this paper proposes a walking model called Fourteen-Linkage Walking (FLW) model to detect some useful features relative with age from 21 to 65 year old. The features of walking stability are then defined and extracted based on the FLW model. Two kinds of stability features, footprint features and walking cycle features, are researched in this paper. To evaluate the walking pattern, a new concept, stability coefficient, is suggested. Our results show that the footprint and walking cycle features have close correlation with ages.