Transductive Learning Models for Accurate Ambulatory Gait Analysis in Elderly Residents of Assisted Living Facilities

Instrumented footwear represents a promising technology for spatiotemporal gait analysis in out-of-the-lab conditions. However, moderate accuracy impacts this technology’s ability to capture subtle, but clinically meaningful, changes in gait patterns that may indicate adverse outcomes or underlying neurological conditions. This limitation hampers the use of instrumented footwear to aid functional assessments and clinical decision making. This paper introduces new transductive-learning inference models that substantially reduce measurement errors relative to conventional data processing techniques, without requiring subject-specific labelled data. The proposed models use subject-optimized input features and hyperparameters to adjust the spatiotemporal gait metrics (i.e., stride time, length, and velocity, swing time, and double support time) obtained with conventional techniques, resulting in computationally simpler models compared to end-to-end machine learning approaches. Model validity and reliability were evaluated against a gold-standard electronic walkway during a clinical gait performance test (6-minute walk test) administered to N = 95 senior residents of assisted living facilities with diverse levels of gait and balance impairments. Average reductions in absolute errors relative to conventional techniques were −42.0% and −33.5% for spatial and gait-phase parameters, respectively, indicating the potential of transductive learning models for improving the accuracy of instrumented footwear for ambulatory gait analysis.