Novel methodology for estimating Initial Contact events from accelerometers positioned at different body locations

This study presents a novel methodology that is capable of estimating ICE from accelerometers placed at different body locations. The proposed methodology, called DK-TiFA, is based on utilizing domain knowledge about the fundamental spectral relationships present between the movement of different body parts during gait to drive the time-frequency analysis of the acceleration signal. In order to assess the performance, DK-TiFA is benchmarked on four large publicly available gait databases, consisting of a total of 613 subjects and 7 unique body locations, namely, ankle, thigh, center waist, side waist, chest, upper arm and wrist. The DK-TiFA methodology is demonstrated to achieve high accuracy and robustness for estimating ICE from data consisting of different accelerometer specifications, varying gait speeds and different environments.