Development of normative walking gait kinematics database for Filipinos using MS kinect V2

Gait analysis has greatly aided clinical applications particularly in the assessment of a person's gait condition. Detection of injuries and gait abnormalities has been one of the key applications of gait analysis as it can be implemented in many ways using different methods and a number of available technologies can be used to aid the study. This paper presents kinematic walking gait analysis as a way to establish a normative walking gait database that will serve as reference for clinical applications including the aforementioned abnormality detection, treatment of injuries, and rehabilitation. Moreover, this paper focused on one ethnicity — particularly Filipinos — as the source of test subjects since the target application of the proposed database is for Filipinos. Test subjects that were recruited in the study have no history of any injury or gait abnormality and were divided according to age, gender, and Body Mass Index (BMI). Simulations of hemiplegic and diplegic gait were also performed by imitating and applying braces on the knees of a normal test subject that prevent them from performing a normal gait pattern. Simulated hemiplegic and diplegic subjects yielded a significant difference on spatiotemporal parameters when compared to normal walking gait. Gender related difference on step length and knee flexion/extension were present while no significant difference was observed when BMI was used as basis for comparison. This paper presents a method using Microsoft Kinect V2 in the acquisition of the 25-point skeletal system which is then used for the calculation of kinematic and spatiotemporal parameters needed in the study.