Introduction: We started this project with a simple question "what is a gait?," and immediately found ourselves immersed in an entirely new and amazing field of engineering, biomechanics. We found that a gait is the way in which a human walks, their stride, and found ourselves questioning how we could analyze this gait in order to create a model that could tell us all about a person just based on how they walked. We started with a mini project that helped us get an idea of the type of data we would be analyzing. This small project gave us eight known subject and four unknown subjects and asked us to analyze patters on the unknown in order to predict what categories the unknown subjects would fit into, adult or child. We created a graph for this project that analyzed the averages for both the known child and adult data and compared the unknown subjects to this graph. If the unknown was closer to the child graph, it was most likely that they are a child and same for the adults. This mini project gave us great insight into how we might analyze the data we gain from ourselves in order to create our own predictive model. For the main part of the project, we were allowed to use an app on our phones that measured acceleration and meter sticks/tape measures to measure distance. By placing the phone on our calves and recording data as we walked for about ten seconds, we created charts for our group members that showed how many steps and how fast the person walked (pictured below). We also gathered the height, leg length, weight, and age of each person to help us analyze our data. We realized that within this data, the frequency of the steps that a person took was inversely proportional to the height of a person. Using this, we created a graph that allows you to find an approximate height for a person based on the number of steps they take over a ten second period (pictured below). Next we created a mini presentation that showcased all of our findings during this process.
Concepts:
Accelerometer: A device that measures the physical acceleration experienced by an object. Dynamicity: In terms of gait analysis, the quantification of variations in kinematic or kinetic parameters within a step. Gait: The stride of a human as s/he moves his/her limbs. Metric: A quantitative indicator of a characteristic or attribute. Model: In technology, a description of observed or predicted behavior of some system, simplified by ignoring certain details. Models allow complex systems to be understood and their behavior predicted. Symmetry: In terms of gait analysis, the quantification of differences between left-foot and right-foot steps. Variability: In terms of gait analysis, the quantification of fluctuations from one stride to the next.
Conclusion: This project was much harder than our reverse engineering project because of the many other assignments we had at the same time. Starting off, we were only given one day to collect data for our project and not given a lot of information into how we should collect the data and what we should be looking for. For our group, we ended up struggling to figure out what kind of data we wanted to collect and ended that day with almost no progress at all. Over the next few weeks, we had to find random spots of time to collect our data and had to recollect it multiple times. We ended on our final decision for how we would collect data only a week before the project was due. This left us very pressured and had us working very hard in order to finish the project on time. Luckily we managed to create what I believe is a really good project by the end and overall really enjoyed what this project taught us. Within our group, we found ourselves struggling to come to a consensus on many many issues throughout the project, causing us a lot of trouble during the entire project. All of our group members had very different ideas as to where we should place the accelerometer, how far or how long the person should walk, and what we parts of a person we should measure for our data tables. On the other hand, we were all very respectful of each others ideas and considered all of them when creating a final product. Furthermore, we all were able to contribute a lot to the final product and without just one of us, our project would not even be as close to what it came out to be. Overall, I loved the topics that this project covered and can't wait for our next project this year.