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Estimation of Human Walking Speed by Doppler Radar for Elderly Care Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments 9 (2017) 181–191 181 DOI 10.3233/AIS-170425 IOS Press Estimation of human walking speed by Doppler radar for elderly care Liyang Rui a, Shanjie Chen a,K.C.Hoa,*, Marilyn Rantz b and Marjorie Skubic a a Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA E-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] b Sinclair School of Nursing, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. This paper presents a human walking speed estimation algorithm using a Doppler radar system for in-home passive gait assessment of elderly adults. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) has been a common approach to obtain the gait speed estimation. The proposed algorithm analyzes the received radar signal by counting its zero-crossing periods in the time domain and applies an interquartile range filter to improve its robustness with respect to the gait signature dynamics in the radar data. The proposed algorithm provides better accuracy and does not seem to produce extreme incorrect speed estimates compared to the previously developed FFT method. It has been applied to the Doppler radar system that is deployed in in-home environments to continuously monitor the daily activities of the senior residences and estimate their gait speeds. Improving the accuracy of gait parameters can better facilitate the assessment of the physical conditions of the seniors. Keywords: Doppler radar, short time Fourier transform, zero-crossing, gait, eldercare 1. Introduction the trends of their gait profiles over time and imply potential health risk [28]. The typical gait monitoring An in-home health monitoring system is beneficial systems are based on video [1,15,17,23,46], wearable to improving the life quality of elderly people by de- sensors [14,33,38], and Doppler radars [13,20,32,39]. tecting harmful events [4,21] and continuously assess- Comparing to other sensors, the Doppler radar is at- ing the physical condition of the seniors [10,35,36,43, tractive because it can detect and measure any move- 44]. Researchers [16,22,31] have shown that gait char- ment in the presence of stationary clutter at the back- acteristics are important indicators in the assessment ground. It provides a more comfortable perception to and diagnosis of frailty and fall risks of elderly adults. the elderly compared to the vision based sensors in- [24] found that the gait velocity is an important pre- cluding Kinect since it has the ability to penetrate dictor of adverse events when the elderly adults are in structures and can hide inside a furniture item or be- good condition. [8] showed gait velocity slowing pre- hind a wall. It does not raise the privacy issue for in- cedes cognitive impairment. The daily walking speed home monitoring and avoids the inconvenience caused measurements have been indicated to be better able to by the wearable devices [10]. A Doppler radar can predict the score of the physical performance of the se- sense the motion in the direction between the radar and niors than the traditional instruments, such as Habit- the subject only and may not have a wide viewing an- ual Gait Speed (HGS) [24], Timed-Up and Go (TUG) gle. These concerns could be handled by using a few [27], and Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB) Doppler radars distributed at several locations or posi- [41]. Therefore, continuous gait measurements based tioning the system at the end of a hallway that naturally on the in-home walking activities of seniors can draw constrains the walking path. The possibility of integrating a Doppler radar into an *Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]. in-home elder care monitoring system has been inves- 1876-1364/17/$35.00 © 2017 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved 182 L. Rui et al. / Estimation of human walking speed by Doppler radar for elderly care tigated in the lab environment in [9,43,45] with posi- monitor the gait characteristics of seniors from their tive results reported. The goal of such a system is to daily activities. track the change of gait characteristics over time and The video based methods have been widely inves- detect the rise of fall risks based on the measurements tigated for human activity analysis. Specifically for from the daily in-home activities of the elderly adults the purpose of elder care, Wang et al. [44], proposed so that effective health care can be adopted early to an indoor webcam-based system to estimate the gait reduce adverse events. The operating environment we characters of seniors including walking speed, stride assumed in this work is a single person in the viewing time and stride length. Similar functions are realized range of a Doppler radar and the identity of the person in [35] by using the Kinect sensor. Both of them show is known. Such an environment is typical in a senior good estimation accuracies. However, the implemen- residence apartment. In this study, we propose a walk- tation of a visual system has many limitations, such ing speed estimation algorithm for elderly adults based as lighting condition, occlusion, and the privacy con- on Doppler signatures and evaluate its performance in cerns. Some researchers utilized wearable devices to realistic in-home environments of the seniors. Unlike monitor the senior adult activities. [33] performed in- the traditional spectrogram based algorithm [43,45], door localization of residents by using a RFID sen- this method explores the Doppler signatures in time sor. [14] took advantage of a smart device, which may domain, analyzes their dynamics by short time zero- be already owned by the residents, and used the built- crossing (STZC) and employs an interquartile range in accelerometer to obtain gait parameters. [38]inves- filter to combat the environmental disturbance, yield- tigated the potential of gait characterization by Fit- ing more reliable and accurate results. Its robustness is bit wristband. The major problem of wearable device first investigated in a lab environment case study when based solution is that carrying a device for long time the highly accurate video based tracking system, Vi- might not be favored by the seniors, especially when con, is served as ground truth. In addition, we discuss they do not feel well [10]. the effect of Doppler angle [40] on the gait speed es- An emerging solution for the human gait analysis is timation. The proposed method has been implemented to use the Doppler radar. The appearance of Doppler in a realistic in-home elder care scenario and its per- signatures in the radar returns caused by human mo- formance is evaluated. tions has been investigated based on time-frequency The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly analysis in [13,20,32,39]. Otero [25] designed a sim- presents related work. Section 3 describes the function ple, binary classifier to detect if a person is present. and setting of the Doppler radar used in the study along [3,5,34] further proposed classifiers to distinguish hu- with a summary about the Vicon system and Kinect mans from animals and other objects. Kim and Ling sensor which serve as the ground truths. Section 4 pro- [18] designed a support vector machine to identify poses the gait speed estimation method. Section 5 an- different human activities such as walking, running, alyzes its robustness by lab experiments and discusses crawling from the Doppler signatures. [26] focused the effect of the Doppler angle. Section 6 evaluates on the gait analysis and proposed a classifier to dis- its performance based on the measurements captured tinguish walking from all the other activities. Yardibi from real in-home activities of many seniors. Section 7 et al. estimated the human walking speed by comput- concludes the paper. ing the short time Fourier transform (STFT) of the radar signal and obtained good accuracy in the lab ex- periments [45]. They also compared the results from 2. Related work radar with those from the staff performing fall risk as- sessment [9]. [43] further investigated the performance Traditionally, trained health care givers assess the of the method in [9,45] by evaluating the effect of walking ability of elderly people in an outpatient set- Doppler angle by laboratory experiments. ting. In addition to high cost, the accuracy of such In this paper, we extend the study from the lab envi- method is inconsistent, which is mainly caused by the ronment [9,43,45] to the actual residences of the senior test environment [2], experience level of the assessor adults. Comparing to the lab condition, the actual liv- [7,19], as well as the emotional state of the subject ing environment is more complex. We implement the [44]. It would be more attractive using an in-home classifier in [26] to distinguish walks from other hu- monitoring system that can automatically measure and man activities, develop a new gait speed estimation al- L. Rui et al. / Estimation of human walking speed by Doppler radar for elderly care 183 gorithm and evaluate its performance in the complex 3.2. Vicon residential environments. The Vicon [42] is a highly accurate human motion capture system. The system measures the 3D coordi- 3. Systems nates of the reflective markers on the elbows, shoul- ders, knees, chest and back of the human subjects at 3.1. Pulse-Doppler radar a rate of 100 frames per second [42]. The system has been installed in the lab and it serves to provide the The Doppler radar used in this study is a pulse- ground truth of human walking speed for evaluation. Doppler radar.
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