Kinect-based non-intrusive human gait analysis and visualization

Home healthcare becomes more and more important with the increased aging population. The advent of various low-cost sensing devices makes it tempting to develop low-cost, non-intrusive systems to monitor the variations of human being. In this paper, we describe a Kinect-based gait analysis and visualization system as a case study in this direction. The system uses depth images and skeleton captured by the Kinect to generate a BVH file recording the motion information, extracts features of gait for detecting abnormal gait, and customizes the 3D body model for personalized motion visualization. Compared to previous work in this area, the proposed system has advantages since it integrates gait classification and visualization which may bring new possibilities in healthcare. The experiments show that our proposed system achieves accurate gait classification as well as flexible personalized 3D visualization.