Analyzing coordination of upper and lower extremities in human gait

Abstract

Human gait has been studied in biomechanical and clinical research for a long time. Researchers use many different tools to detect and analyze human walking motions. 3D kinematic data captured by motion capture system is one of powerful tools to analyze the human motions. However, not many researches have focused on coordination of upper extremities during human locomotion. In this paper, we introduce the concept of feature extractions to analyze the upper and lower extremities on human gait. For analyzing coordination between arm joint and leg joint movement, we developed a gait visualization tool to measure velocity and angle of each arm joint and leg joint pair, and compare three different gait speeds (e.g., slow walk, casual walk, and fast walk) for each feature extraction.