Gait and balance analysis for patients with Alzheimer's disease using an inertial-sensor-based wearable instrument.

Despite patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were reported of revealing gait disorders and balance problems, there is still lack of objective quantitative measurement of gait patterns and balance capability of AD patients. Based on an inertial-sensor-based wearable device, this paper develops gait and balance analyzing algorithms to obtain quantitative measurements and explores the essential indicators from the measurements for AD diagnosis. The gait analyzing algorithm is composed of stride detection followed by gait cycle decomposition so that gait parameters are developed from the decomposed gait details.