Predicting physiological developments from human gait using smartphone sensor data

Abstract

Coronary artery disease, heart failure, angina pectoris and diabetes are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality over the globe. Susceptibility to such disorders is compounded by changing lifestyles, poor dietary routines, aging and obesity. Besides, conventional diagnostics are limited in their capability to detect such pathologies at an early stage. This generates demand for automatic recommender systems that could effectively monitor and predict pathogenic behaviors in the body. To this end, we propose human gait analysis for predicting two important physiological parameters associated with different diseases, body mass index and age. Predicting age and body mass index by actively profiling the gait samples, could be further used for providing suitable healthcare recommendations. Existing strategies for predicting age and body mass index, however, necessitate stringent experimental settings for achieving appropriate performance. For instance, precisely recorded speech signals were recently used for predicting body mass indices of different subjects. Similarly, age groups were predicted by recording gait samples from on-body and wearable sensors. Such specialized methods limit active and convenient profiling of human age and body mass indices. We address these issues, by introducing smartphone sensors as a means for recording gait signals. Using on-board accelerometer and gyroscope helps in developing easy-to-use and accessible systems for predicting body mass index and age. To empirically show the effectiveness of our proposed methodology, we collected gait samples from sixty-three different subjects that were classified in body mass index and age groups using six well-known machine learning classifiers. We evaluated our system using two different windowing operations for feature extraction, namely Gaussian and Square.