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Accurate gait detection is crucial in utilizing the ample health information embedded in it. Vision-based approaches for gait detection have emerged as an alternative to the exacting sensor-based approaches, but their application has been rather limited due to complicated feature engineering processes and heavy reliance on lateral views. Thus, this study aimed to find a simple vision-based approach that is view-independent and accurate. A total of 22 participants performed six different actions representing standard and peculiar gaits, and the videos acquired from these actions were used as the input of the deep learning networks. Four networks, including a 2D convolutional neural network and an attention-based deep learning network, were trained with standard gaits, and their detection performance for both standard and peculiar gaits was assessed using measures including F1-scores. While all networks achieved remarkable detection performance, the CNN-Transformer network achieved the best performance for both standard and peculiar gaits. Little deviation by the speed of actions or view angles was found. The study is expected to contribute to the wider application of vision-based approaches in gait detection and gait-based health monitoring both at home and in clinical settings.

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Elderly gait is a source of rich information about their physical and mental health condition. As an alternative to the multiple sensors on the lower body parts, a single sensor on the pelvis has a positional advantage and an abundance of information acquirable. This study aimed to improve the accuracy of gait event detection in the elderly using a single sensor on the waist and deep learning models. Data were gathered from elderly subjects equipped with three IMU sensors while they walked. The input taken only from the waist sensor was used to train 16 deep-learning models including a CNN, RNN, and CNN-RNN hybrid with or without the Bidirectional and Attention mechanism. The groundtruth was extracted from foot IMU sensors. A fairly high accuracy of 99.73% and 93.89% was achieved by the CNN-BiGRU-Att model at the tolerance window of ±6 TS (±6 ms) and ±1 TS (±1 ms), respectively. Advancing from the previous studies exploring gait event detection, the model demonstrated a great improvement in terms of its prediction error having an MAE of 6.239 ms and 5.24 ms for HS and TO events, respectively, at the tolerance window of ±1 TS. The results demonstrated that the use of CNN-RNN hybrid models with Attention and Bidirectional mechanisms is promising for accurate gait event detection using a single waist sensor. The study can contribute to reducing the burden of gait detection and increase its applicability in future wearable devices that can be used for remote health monitoring (RHM) or diagnosis based thereon.

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Vision-based human joint angle estimation is essential for remote and continuous health monitoring. Most vision-based angle estimation methods use the locations of human joints extracted using optical motion cameras, depth cameras, or human pose estimation models. This study aimed to propose a reliable and straightforward approach with deep learning networks for knee and elbow flexion/extension angle estimation from the RGB video. Fifteen healthy participants performed four daily activities in this study. The experiments were conducted with four different deep learning networks, and the networks took nine subsequent frames as input while output was knee and elbow joint angles extracted from an optical motion capture system for each frame. The BiLSTM network-based joint angles estimator can estimate both joint angles with a correlation of 0.955 for knee and 0.917 for elbow joints regardless of the camera view angles.

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Human gait can serve as a useful behavioral trait for biometrics. Compared to fingerprint, face, and iris, the most commonly used physiological identifiers, gait can be unobtrusively monitored from a distance without requiring explicit involvement and physical restraint from people. Advances in wearable technology facilitate direct and faithful measurement of gait motions with easy-to-use and low-cost inertial sensors. This study aimed to propose an approach to using kinematic gait data collected with wearable inertial sensors for reliable personal identification. Sixty-nine individuals ranged in age from 24 to 62 years old participated in this study. The 3-axis acceleration and the 3-axis angular velocity signals were measured using the inertial measurement units attached to the feet, shanks, thighs, and posterior pelvis while walking. The gait spectrograms were acquired by applying time-frequency analyses to the lower body movement signals measured in one stride. Among each participant's 15 strides, 12 strides were used in the 4-fold cross validation of the deep convolutional neural network-based classifiers, and the remaining three strides were used to evaluate the classifiers. An accuracy of 99.69% was achieved by using the foot, shank, thigh, and pelvic spectrograms, and the accuracy was 96.89% using only the foot spectrograms. This study has the potential to be applied in behavior-based biometric technologies by confirming the feasibility of the proposed kinematic and spectrographic approaches in identifying personal behavioral characteristics.

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The incredible pace at which the world's elderly population is growing will put severe burdens on current healthcare systems and resources. To alleviate this concern the health care systems must rely on the transformation of eldercare and old homes to use Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). Human identification is one of the most common and critical tasks for condition monitoring, human-machine interaction, and providing assistive services in such environments. Recently, human gait has gained new attention as a biometric for identification to achieve contactless identification from a distance robust to physical appearances. However, an important aspect of gait identification through wearables and image-based systems alike is accurate identification when limited information is available for example, when only a fraction of the whole gait cycle or only a part of the subject's body is visible. In this paper, we present a gait identification technique based on temporal and descriptive statistic parameters of different gait phases as the features and we investigate the performance of using only single gait phases for the identification task using a minimum number of sensors. Gait data were collected from 60 individuals through pelvis and foot sensors. Six different machine learning algorithms were used for identification. It was shown that it is possible to achieve high accuracy of over 95.5% by monitoring a single phase of the whole gait cycle through only a single sensor. It was also shown that the proposed methodology could be used to achieve 100% identification accuracy when the whole gait cycle was monitored through pelvis and foot sensors combined. The ANN was found to be more robust to less number of data features compared to SVM and was concluded as the best machine algorithm for the purpose.

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Frailty is a common and critical condition in elderly adults, which may lead to further deterioration of health. However, difficulties and complexities exist in traditional frailty assessments based on activity-related questionnaires. These can be overcome by monitoring the effects of frailty on the gait. In this paper, it is shown that by encoding gait signals as images, deep learning-based models can be utilized for the classification of gait type. Two deep learning models (a) SS-CNN, based on single stride input images, and (b) MS-CNN, based on 3 consecutive strides were proposed. It was shown that MS-CNN performs best with an accuracy of 85.1%, while SS-CNN achieved an accuracy of 77.3%. This is because MS-CNN can observe more features corresponding to stride-to-stride variations which is one of the key symptoms of frailty. Gait signals were encoded as images using STFT, CWT, and GAF. While the MS-CNN model using GAF images achieved the best overall accuracy and precision, CWT has a slightly better recall. This study demonstrates how image encoded gait data can be used to exploit the full potential of deep learning CNN models for the assessment of frailty.

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A noninvasive, optical plasma monitoring method in plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) process for nanoscale water vapor barrier film is presented. Any equipment malfunction, as well as a deviation in the condition of individual components can easily jeopardize the process result. Al2O3 deposition process was employed in this research as a test vehicle, and high-speed optical plasma monitoring was demonstrated. It is shown that optical plasma monitoring is useful for not only measuring plasma pulses in real time, but also for the detection of any variation in plasma condition which enables inferring plasma dynamics for advanced process control in nanoscale thin film deposition process.