A novel dataset for gait activity recognition in real-world environments

Falls are a prominent issue in society and the second leading cause of unintentional death globally. Traditional gait analysis is a process that can aid in identifying factors that increase a person’s risk of falling through determining their gait parameters in a controlled environment. Advances in wearable sensor technology and analytical methods such as deep learning can enable remote gait analysis, increasing the quality of the collected data, standardizing the process between centers, and automating aspects of the analysis. Real-world gait analysis requires two problems to be solved: high-accuracy Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and high-accuracy terrain classification. High accuracy HAR has been achieved through the application of powerful novel classification techniques to various HAR datasets; however, terrain classification cannot be approached in this way due to a lack of suitable datasets. In this study, we present the Context-Aware Human Activity Recognition (CAHAR) dataset: the first activity- and terrain-labeled dataset that targets a full range of indoor and outdoor terrains, along with the common gait activities associated with them. Data were captured using Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), Force-Sensing Resistor (FSR) insoles, color sensors, and LiDARs from 20 healthy participants. With this dataset, researchers can develop new classification models that are capable of both HAR and terrain identification to progress the capabilities of wearable sensors towards remote gait analysis.