Walking stability analysis by age based on Dynamic Time Warping

There are more and more researches on walking stability analysis for health management of elderly people. This study presents a definition and an assessment of human walking stability. Its main objectives are to propose a technique to quantify local dynamic stability, and to study the relationship between walking stability and age in developing an understanding of normal gait. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is an algorithm for measuring similarity between two sequences, which is employed to estimate the walking stability based on Fourteen-Linkage (FL) walking model. The walking data are from 58 health subjects aged from 21 to 65, walking on a regular surface. The results show that when subject walks on a regular surface, the walking stabilities including subjectpsilas position, velocity and acceleration have some relationships with age.