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Multiple tasks are simultaneously performed during walking in our daily life. Distracted walk by smartphone usage is recently getting a social problem. The term dual-task gait refers to the secondary task added to the walking. Attention demanding tasks may influence how a person walks. Since in-lab measurement may not accurately reflect the daily living gait, wearable sensors approach have been proposed for gait analysis in an out-of-lab setting. This study addresses the potential of using only two inertial measurement units (IMUs) attached to the shoes for the assessment of cognitive dual-task gait and how it differs from single-task gait. We found that the proposed system is sensitive to recognizing a tiny change in gait features such as on the double support time and gait indices when subject performing dual-task gait compared to the single-task gait experiment.

In this study, we proposed a framework for extracting gait events and extensive temporal features, seamlessly, during walking and running on a treadmill by constructing a finite state machine (FSM) transition rules based on two IMU sensors attached to the back of the shoes. Detailed innerclass states were defined to recognize the double support phase on walking gait and the double flight phase on running gait. Further, an in-depth speed-based analysis of temporal gait features can be performed for each tested speed with an automatic speed change detection algorithm based on the moving average filter applied to motion intensity data. The results have demonstrated that the FSM can accurately distinguish walking gait and running gait while also extract a detailed gait phase, respectively. This finding may contribute to a more flexible gait analysis where a change in speed or transition from walk to run can be anticipated and recognized accordingly.