I-Walk Intelligent Assessment System: Activity, Mobility, Intention, Communication

Abstract

We present the i-Walk system, a novel framework for intelligent mobility assistance applications. The proposed system is capable of automatically understanding human activity, assessing mobility and rehabilitation progress, recognizing human intentions and communicating with the patients by giving meaningful feedback. To this end, multiple sensors, i.e. cameras, microphones, lasers, provide multimodal data in order to allow for user monitoring, while state-of-the-art and beyond algorithms have been developed and integrated into the system to enable recognition, interaction and assessment. More specifically, i-Walk performs in real-time and consists of four main sub-modules that interact automatically to provide speech understanding, activity recognition, mobility analysis and multimodal communication for seamless HRI. The i-Walk assessment system is evaluated on a database of healthy subjects and patients, who participated in carefully designed experimental scenarios that cover essential needs of rehabilitation. The presented results highlight the efficacy of the proposed framework to endow personal assistants with intelligence.