Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tennessee, Measurement Science and Systems Engineering (MSSE) Division biomedical engineers, Boyd Evans III, PhD, and John Mueller, are perfecting a portable, wearable system to measure walking patterns that can be applied to real-world activities in a variety of settings. The intent is to improve prosthesis performance and lifespan while improving gait for wounded service members. Evans and Mueller’s work represents an overall collaboration with the Center for the Intrepid (CFI) at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC), San Antonio, Texas; and Duderstadt, Germany-based Ottobock.
ORNL biomedical engineers Boyd Evans and John Mueller are working to improve prosthetic fitting and design for young military amputees. Photograph courtesy of the Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
To monitor the motion and force of walking patterns, Evans and Mueller are collaborating with BAMC to use inertial measurement units (IMU) and other sensors that can be strapped onto segments of a subject’s leg, such as the thigh, calf, and foot. The data collected from the IMU transfers to a computer, and algorithms calculate the motions and forces associated with specific joints.
“For example, if an amputee soldier wants to train and return to active duty, we need to understand how he or she would fare on a military training course, which you can’t measure in a laboratory setting,” said Evans, who leads the project.
To test the effectiveness of IMUs, Evans and Mueller use a robot leg that has been programmed with data from a walking person. Evans and Mueller plan on going to the Gait and Motion Analysis Laboratory at the CFI in a few months to test their system on a human subject with a unilateral, lower-limb amputation.
ORNL MSSE Division senior development staff engineer Randall Lind is developing an advanced platform to measure the forces associated with motion; ORNL MSSE Division group researchers, Nance Ericson and Ethan Farquhar, are integrating the entire system to incorporate wireless data collection.
Additionally, Evans and Mueller want to develop a gait-analysis system that can be used outside of a confined laboratory setting. A subset to this overall project, called “Using Kinect for Xbox 360 and Computer Vision to Analyze Human Gait,” won the Siemens Competition for Math, Science and Technology, top team category, in early December. Summer interns Cassee Cain and Ziyuan Liu worked with Evans and Mueller on the project in which the multi-camera Microsoft Kinect is connected to a computer that uses body-tracking algorithms to measure how different parts of the leg move when someone is walking.
