An Overview of Wearable Sensing and Wearable Feedback for Gait Retraining

Wearable gait retraining could enable benefits from laboratory retraining systems to extend to a broad portion of the population, which doesn’t live near or have access to laboratory gait retraining testing facilities. While few portable gait retraining systems utilize both wearable sensing and wearable feedback, several systems employ critical components. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of various wearable sensing or wearable feedback components for gait retraining. We discuss wearable inertial sensors including accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers to estimate gait kinematics, wearable haptic feedback for retraining gait kinematics, wearable goniometers for measuring 2D and 3D ankle kinematics, and wearable measures of foot force and foot pressure. We conclude with a forward look at the future of wearable gait retraining systems and possible applications.