• Maintaining appropriate amount of physical activity is essential for health and disease prevention. Gait is the most common type of physical activity in everyday life. Monitoring the amount of physical activity in everyday lives may benefit mainly those who are at threat of metabolic syndrome and overweight. Towards better estimation of the amount of physical activity utilizing wearable sensors, we focused on taking running and walking economy into account. The relationship between step length and oxygen uptake was first determined. Step length estimation with moderate accuracy was accomplished using acceleration signals during walking. Step length was then taken into energy expenditure calculation as one of the variables.

Together with the basic version of the current locomotion monitoring system capable of counting staircase climbing up & down, we managed to upgrade our locomotion monitoring system into 3 dimensional.

• acceleration sensor
• barometric sensor
• energy consumption
• step length