Investigating running gait using a shoe-integrated wireless inertial sensor

Inertial sensor have been widely used to analyze human walking, but only few studies used inertial sensor to analyze running gait. This paper presented the use of inertial sensor to identify running gait phases and to estimate running speed. An experimental study were conducted to validate the feasibility of this approach. In this experiment, sensor were positioned on top of the third metatarsal of the foot. Subjects were requested to run at 8 km/h - 11 km/h. Raw acceleration and angular velocity were recorded. An off-phase segmentation was then employed to segment the running sequence into individual stride. The orientation of the foot was determined through integration and the running speed was estimated by integrating the acceleration data. The results were satisfactory. The root mean square error (RMSE) were found to be ranging between 4.54% and 5.59% for all the estimated running speed.