Rezaul Begg

• BSc Eng, MSc Eng, PhD
• Victoria University

The continuous, automated monitoring of sensor-based data for walking capacity and mobility has expanded gait analysis applications beyond controlled laboratory settings to real-world, everyday environments facilitated by the development of portable, cost-efficient wearable sensors. In particular, the integration of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs...

Stroke rehabilitation interventions require multiple training sessions and repeated assessments to evaluate the improvements from training. Biofeedback-based treadmill training often involves 10 or more sessions to determine its effectiveness. The training and assessment process incurs time, labor, and cost to determine whether the training produce...

Featured Application The machine learning model predicts Minimum Foot Clearance heights to prevent tripping falls. Integrated into exoskeletons or other assistive devices, it offers real-time interventions for vulnerable populations, enhancing safety with quick and accurate foot clearance adjustments. Abstract Tripping is the largest cause of fall...

Introduction: Manual handling personnel and those performing manual handling tasks in non-traditional manual handling industries continue to suffer debilitating and costly workplace injuries. Smart assistive devices are one solution to reducing musculoskeletal back injuries. Devices that provide targeted assistance need to be able to predict when a...

Background To step over an unexpected obstacle, individuals adapt gait; they adjust step length in the anterior-posterior direction prior to the obstacle and minimum toe clearance height in the vertical direction during obstacle avoidance. Inability to adapt gait may lead to falls in older adults with diabetes as the results of the effects of diabe...

Tripping is the largest cause of falls and low swing foot ground clearance during the mid-swing phase, particularly at the critical gait event known as Minimum Foot Clearance (MFC) is the major risk factor for tripping-related falls. Intervention strategies to increase MFC height can be effective if applied in real-time based on feed-forward predic...

Background Adaptive gait involves the ability to adjust the leading foot in response to the requirement of dynamic environments during walking. Accurate adjustments of the minimum toe clearance (MTC) height and step length can prevent older people from falling when walking and responding to hazards. Although older people with diabetes fall more fre...

Walking independently is essential to maintaining our quality of life but safe locomotion depends on perceiving hazards in the everyday environment. To address this problem, there is an increasing focus on developing assistive technologies that can alert the user to the risk destabilizing foot contact with either the ground or obstacles, leading to...

Background To step over an unexpected obstacle, individuals adapt gait; they adjust step length in the anterior-posterior direction prior to the obstacle and minimum toe clearance height in the vertical direction. Inability to adapt gait may lead to falls in older adults with diabetes. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate gait adaptability in...

Efficient, adaptive, locomotor function is critically important for maintaining our health and independence, but falls-related injuries when walking are a significant risk factor, particularly for more vulnerable populations such as older people and post-stroke individuals. Tripping is the leading cause of falls, and the swing-phase event Minimum F...

Background: Adapt gait is abilities to adjust the leading foot in response to the requirement of dynamic environments during walking. Accurate adjustments of the minimum toe clearance (MTC) height and step length can prevent older people from falling when walking and responding to hazards. Although older diabetic patients fall more frequently than...

Globally, we are facing the tendency of aging, and demands for health enhancement among the older population have been steadily increasing. Among various exercise interventions, Pilates has been popularly utilized in rehabilitation; therefore, it is considered suitable for vulnerable populations. In this study, frail late-stage older adults (>75 ye...

Powered ankle exoskeletons (PAEs) are robotic devices developed for gait assistance, rehabilitation, and augmentation. To fulfil their purposes, PAEs vastly rely heavily on their sensor systems. Human–machine interface sensors collect the biomechanical signals from the human user to inform the higher level of the control hierarchy about the user’s...

Increased falls risk is prevalent among stroke survivors with gait impairments. Tripping is the leading cause of falls and it is highly associated with mid-swing Minimum Foot Clearance (MFC), when the foot’s vertical margin from the walking surface is minimal. The current study investigated MFC characteristics of post-stroke individuals (n = 40) an...

In demographically aging societies, effective exercise interventions for senior adults are urgently needed to support healthy aging. Gait impairment is one of the negative characteristics of age-associated declines in physical function, which increases the risk of falls-related injuries. Tripping and consequent balance loss are the primary cause of...

Featured Application Knee osteoarthritis (OA) can be prevented using orthoses with actuators controlled using real-time biofeedback from wearable motion-sensors and multi-function exoskeletons and, incorporating integrated electro-magnetic stimulators may also enhance regenerative medicine treatments for knee OA. Abstract Knee osteoarthritis (OA)...

Post-stroke hemiparesis often impairs gait and increases the risks of falls. Low and variable Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC) from the ground during the swing phase of the gait cycle has been identified as a major cause of such falls. In this paper, we study MTC characteristics in 30 chronic stroke patients, extracted from gait patterns during treadmil...

Hemiplegic stroke often impairs gait and increases falls risk during rehabilitation. Tripping is the leading cause of falls, but the risk can be reduced by increasing vertical swing foot clearance, particularly at the mid-swing phase event, minimum foot clearance (MFC). Based on previous reports, real-time biofeedback training may increase MFC. Six...

Objective The aim of this review was to determine how exoskeletons could assist Australian Defence Force personnel with manual handling tasks. Background Musculoskeletal injuries due to manual handling are physically damaging to personnel and financially costly to the Australian Defence Force. Exoskeletons may minimize injury risk by supporting, a...

This study determined whether the kinematics of lower limb trajectories during walking could be extrapolated using long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. It was hypothesised that LSTM auto encoders could reliably forecast multiple time-step trajectories of the lower limb kinematics, specifically linear acceleration (LA) and angular velocity...

Falls prevention is an important healthcare topic in an ageing society due to serious and costly injuries. Gait biomechanics utilising 3D motion capture system can possibly identify fall-prone walking patterns. It is, therefore, important to reveal factors for negative gait changes and higher falls risks. A total of 54 community-dwelling senior cit...

Despite a number of strategies to minimise falls risks, older adults tend to avoid voluntary and continuous engagement into interventions without cost effectiveness and simplicity. Shoe-insole modification may be a practical intervention if it alters foot geometry inside a shoe and improves gait patterns to prevent falls. The current study designed...

Wearable sensors are being applied to real-world motion monitoring and the focus of this work is assessing health status and wellbeing. An extensive literature has documented the effects on gait control of impaired physical health, but in this project, the aim was to determine whether emotional states associated with older people’s mental health ar...

Background: The risk of falling is significantly higher in people with chronic stroke and it is, therefore, important to design interventions to improve mobility and decrease falls risk. Minimum toe clearance (MTC) is the key gait cycle event for predicting tripping-falls because it occurs mid-swing during the walking cycle where forward velocity...

Background The risk of falling is significantly higher in people with chronic stroke and it is, therefore, important to design interventions to improve mobility and decrease falls risk. Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC) is the key gait cycle event for predicting tripping-falls because it occurs mid-swing during the walking cycle where forward velocity of...

Background: The risk of falling is significantly higher in people with chronic stroke and it is, therefore, important to design interventions to improve mobility and decrease falls risk. Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC) is the key gait cycle event for predicting tripping-falls because it occurs mid-swing during the walking cycle where forward velocity o...

Impaired walking increases injury risk during locomotion, including falls-related acute injuries and overuse damage to lower limb joints. Gait impairments seriously restrict voluntary, habitual engagement in injury prevention activities, such as recreational walking and exercise. There is, therefore, an urgent need for technology-based intervention...

Human walking can be viewed essentially as a continuum of anterior balance loss followed by a step that re-stabilizes balance. To secure balance an extended base of support can be assistive but healthy young adults tend to walk with relatively narrower steps compared to vulnerable populations (e.g. older adults and patients). It was, therefore, hyp...

Minimum-toe-clearance (MTC) above the walking surface is a critical representation of toe-trajectory control due to its association with tripping risk. Not all gait cycles exhibit a clearly defined MTC within the swing phase but there have been few previous accounts of the biomechanical characteristics of non-MTC gait cycles. The present report inv...

Healthcare sensor networks (HSNs) now offer the possibility to continuously monitor human activity and physiological signals in a mobile environment. Such sensor networks may be able to reduce the strain on the present healthcare workforce by providing new autonomous monitoring services ranging from simple user-reminder systems to more advanced mon...

The present study investigates the inertial sensor kinematics obtained at a critical toe-control event, Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC), to classify dierent age groups. Fourteen young and fourteen older adults performed treadmill walking at their preferred walking speed, wearing a shoe-mount inertial sensor unit measuring tri-axial acceleration and tri...

Falls are the primary cause of accidental injuries (52%) and one of the leading causes of death in individuals aged 65 and above. More than 50% of falls in healthy older adults are due to tripping while walking. Minimum toe clearance (i.e., minimum height of the toe above the ground during the mid-swing phase - MTC) has been investigated as an indi...

Knee osteoarthritis is commonly associated with ageing and long-term walking. In this study the effects of flexing motions on knee kinetics during stance were simulated. Extended knees do not facilitate efficient loading. It was therefore, hypothesised that knee flexion would promote power absorption and negative work, while possibly reducing knee...

Falls in older adults during walking frequently occur while performing a concurrent task; that is, dividing attention to respond to other demands in the environment. A particularly hazardous fall-related event is tripping due to toe-ground contact during the swing phase of the gait cycle. The aim of this experiment was to determine the effects of d...

Falls are an important healthcare concern in the older population and tripping is the primary cause. Greater swing foot-ground clearance is functional for tripping prevention. Trips frequently occur due to the lowest part of the shoe contacting the walking surface. Shoe design effects on swing foot-ground clearance are, therefore, important conside...

Falls during walking reflect susceptibility to balance loss and the individual's capacity to recover stability. Balance can be recovered using either one step or multiple steps but both responses are impaired with ageing. To investigate older adults' (n=15, 72.5±4.8yrs) recovery step control a tether-release procedure was devised to induce unantici...

Assistive technology has not yet reached an acceptable level of success in addressing the needs of the elderly to navigate safely, comfortably, gracefully, and independently. This paper discussing on the development of microcontroller based wireless obstacle detection system for the elderly, which attached at shoes to facilitate safe navigation and...

Background Fatigue and ageing contribute to impaired control of walking and are linked to falls. In this project, fatigue was induced by maximum speed walking to examine fatigue effects on lower limb trajectory control and associated tripping risk and overall gait functions of older adults. Methods Eleven young (18–35 years) and eleven older adult...

Ultrasonic (US) and infrared (IR) sensors are broadly used in mobile applications for distance measurements. In this project, an obstacle detection system is built based on these two types of sensors. The system is intended for use by the elderly and people with vision impairment. The prototype developed has been tested to detect obstacles and show...

Falls risk increases with ageing but is substantially higher in people with stroke. Tripping-related balance loss is the primary cause of falls, and Minimum Toe Clearance (MTC) during walking is closely linked to tripping risk. The aim of this study was to determine whether real-time augmented information of toe-ground clearance at MTC can increase...

Pathologies of the foot are amongst some of the most debilitating problems affecting individuals of all ages. Often, these pathologies are painful and correspond with high or abnormal plantar pressure, which can result in asymmetry between the feet during pathological gait. These problems, if left untreated, can escalate to severe plantar injury. T...

Foot pain has long been associated with various pathologies of the foot. These common clinical problems often correspond with high plantar pressure, which can lead to severe plantar injury if it is left untreated. The detection of plantar pressure abnormalities is therefore of paramount importance for the diagnosis, early intervention, treatment an...

Intra-body communication (IBC) is a recent and emerging wireless communication technology, which treats the human body as a transmission medium for transmitting and receiving the electrical signals. Pioneer IBC researchers have proposed two types of methods, which are galvanic coupling and capacitive coupling. This paper compares and evaluates a bi...

Assistive technology is an emerging research area, where adaptable devices can be developed to help older people to achieve independence in their daily activities. This paper presents the design and development of a wearable wireless obstacle detection system suitable for the elderly and visually impaired people. The proposed system is capable of d...

Falls prevention is important for older individuals to maintain healthy lifestyles and is an essential challenge in sustaining the socioeconomic structure of many advanced nations. Tripping has been recognized as the largest cause of falls and accordingly, understanding tripping-induced anterior balance loss is necessary in reducing the overall fre...

The current study used falls direction to categorize falls and explore age-related effects on the biomechanics of medio-lateral balance control. Minimum lateral margin (MLM) was defined as the critical swing phase event where the medio-lateral length between center of mass (CoM) and stance heel became minimum and accordingly, any lateral balance pe...

Unlabelled: Slipping biomechanics was investigated on both non-contaminated and oil-contaminated surfaces during unconstrained straight-line walking ('walking'), turning, gait initiation and termination. In walking, backward slipping was more frequent, whereas forward slipping was more frequent when turning. Stopping and gait initiation engendered...

Although lower limb strength becomes asymmetrical with age, past studies of aging effects on gait biomechanics have usually analyzed only one limb. This experiment measured how aging and treadmill surface influenced both dominant and nondominant step parameters in older (mean 74.0 y) and young participants (mean 21.9 y). Step-cycle parameters were...

Identifying different activities during walking is a key requirement for ubiquitous gait monitoring, particularly when engineering new falls prevention solutions. In this study, 5 healthy young individuals (aged 26 ± 2 years old) completed 6 different tasks (a) walking with preferred walking speed (PWS), (b) walking with 10 % increment in the PWS,...

This study uses the Xsense MTx sensors for monitoring head and trunk motion during free walking activity over different ground surfaces i.e., tiled, cemented and cobbled surfaces. The MTx sensors are small in size and unobtrusive and do not cause any discomfort to the subjects. These sensors are easy to use for the outdoor walking experiment and re...

We would like to comment on a recent review article published in Sensors by Razak et al. [1]. The authors provided a review of plantar pressure measurement systems which included the discussion of the recently developed WalkinSense® system. While the authors correctly identified that our group completed research using this system [2], they have ina...

Foot plantar pressure is the pressure field that acts between the foot and the support surface during everyday locomotor activities. Information derived from such pressure measures is important in gait and posture research for diagnosing lower limb problems, footwear design, sport biomechanics, injury prevention and other applications. This paper r...

Developing sensor technologies for avoiding foot contact with obstacles or uneven surfaces is a potentially powerful intervention for maintaining balance while undertaking hazardous gait tasks. Such interventions are particularly important in individuals influenced either by ageing or gait pathologies. This research describes an infrared sensor sys...

A number of variability analysis techniques, including Poincaré plots and detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) were used to investigate minimum toe clearance (MTC) control during walking. Ten young adults walked on a treadmill for 10 min at preferred speed in three conditions: (i) no-intervention baseline, (ii) with biofeedback of MTC within a targ...

Identifying different walking conditions is essential in order to monitor the activities of elderly population for active living or fast recovery of a patient following a surgery or even for prognosis and diagnosis of several conditions like Parkinson's disease. This paper looks at automatically detecting three different walking conditions (walking...

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a digital data acquisition (DAQ) system-on-chip (SoC) with wireless telemetry for Micro-electromechanical (MEMS) foot plantar pressure sensors. The chip is intended for an in-shoe wireless pressure measurement system to analyze pressure distribution during normal daily life activities. The proje...

A mobility assistive device that can assist to navigate in the environment and keep away from collisions with obstacles could help reduce health costs and enhance the quality of care and independence of the elderly. Traditionally mobility assistive devices have been electromechanical devices which have the main function to provide physical support...

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) has been shown to be a risk factor for falls. Reductions in foot clearance during the swing phase of walking can cause a trip and potentially lead to a fall. This study examined the swing phase mechanics of people with and without knee OA during walking. Minimum toe clearance (MTC) height, joint angles at the time of MTC an...

Foot plantar pressure is the pressure fields that act between the foot skin and its supporting surface that humans experience during daily activities. Information derived from such pressure is important for diagnosing lower limb problems, footwear design, sport biomechanics performance and injury prevention. This paper presents the design and imple...

Obstacle detection is one of the important aspects to be considered in the development of smart assistive devices. The latest mobility assistive devices are equipped with this function as a safety precaution for the users to avoid obstacles in their path. In this project, a wireless, miniature, low cost, obstacle detection system is proposed. The s...

Ageing influences gait patterns which in turn can affect the balance control of human locomotion. Entropy-based regularity and complexity measures have been highly effective in analysing a broad range of physiological signals. Minimum toe clearance (MTC) is an event during the swing phase of the gait cycle and is highly sensitive to the spatial bal...

Advanced mathematical models are now widely used in medical applications for diagnosis, prognosis, and prevention of diseases. This work looks at the application of advanced regression models for estimating key foot parameters in falls prevention research. Falls is a serious issue for the rapidly increasing elderly demographic. We propose to invest...

Foot clearance parameters provide useful insight into tripping risks during walking. This paper proposes a technique for the estimate of key foot clearance parameters using inertial sensor (accelerometers and gyroscopes) data. Fifteen features were extracted from raw inertial sensor measurements, and a regression model was used to estimate two key...

Foot-ground clearance during the gait cycle swing phase is a critical locomotor adaptation to uneven terrain and non-optimal lower limb control has been linked to tripping and falling. The aim of this research was to determine ageing effects on bilateral foot-ground clearance during overground and treadmill walking. Ageing and walking surface effec...

Inertial measurement units (IMU) comprising accelerometers and gyroscopes have recently found use in a wide range of motion analysis applications. Even though the technique of inferring secondary parameters such as velocity, displacement and angular rotation is greatly influenced by sensor noise, IMUs continue to find interest in movement studies d...

It is essential for any highly trained cyclist to optimize his pedalling movement in order to maximize the performance and minimize the risk of injuries. Current techniques rely on bicycle fitting and off-line laboratory measurements. These techniques do not allow the assessment of the kinematics of the cyclist during training and competition, when...

Minimum foot clearance (MFC) is the minimum vertical distance between the lowest point of the foot of the swing leg and the walking surface during the swing phase of the gait cycle. MFC is a gait variable that is linked to the mechanism of a trip because reduced MFC for a given step during walking increases the susceptibility to tripping on an unse...

Tripping and falling is a serious health problem for older citizens due to the high medical costs incurred and the high mortality rates precipitated mostly by hip fractures that do not heal well. Current falls prevention technology encompasses a broad range of interventions; both passive (e.g., safer environments, hip protectors) and active (e.g.,...

In high-performance cycling, there is a need for advanced technological means of assessing the cyclists’ performance during training and competition, and the risk of overuse injuries. Existing techniques rely on off-line, laboratory-based analysis, as well as on outfitting the bike with various sensors and transducers that give an estimate of the p...

A major concern in human movement research is preventing tripping and falling which is known to cause severe injuries and high fatalities in elderly (>65 years) populations. Current falls prevention technology consists of active interventions e.g., strength and balance exercises, preimpact fall detectors, and passive interventions e.g., shower rail...

Swing toe trajectory has been investigated due to its association with tripping-induced falls. This study investigated how motion of the entire foot segment influences the toe trajectory. Seven young and seven older participants walked both over-ground and on a treadmill to obtain the swing foot trajectory data. No ageing effects were obtained for...

Abstract-Cardiac arrhythmia is one of the major causes of human death, and most of the time it cannot be predicted well in advance at the right time. Computational intelligence algorithms can help in extracting the hidden patterns of biological datasets. This paper explores the use of advanced and intelligent computational algorithms for automated...

Most falls in older adults are reported during locomotion and tripping has been identified as a major cause of falls. Challenging environments (e.g., walking on slopes) are potential interventions for maintaining balance and gait skills. The aims of this study were: 1) to investigate whether or not distributions of two important gait variables [min...

Pressure sensing is one of the mostly performed measurement encompassing varieties of applications. The latest technology such as silicon based Micro-electromechanical Systems (MEMS) technology is favoured due to its competitive cost and proven performance. In our research, MEMS pressure sensor for biomedical application is investigated. There are...

This paper presents an ensemble of feature selection and classification technique for classifying two types of breast lesion, benign and malignant. Features are selected based on their area under the ROC curves (AUC) which are then classified using a hybrid hidden Markov model (HMM)-fuzzy approach. HMM generated log-likelihood values are used to ge...

In our modern living era, pressure sensing is one of the most performed measurements to enhance the quality of life. The more advanced technology such as silicon based Micro-electro-mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology is usually explored due to its competitive cost and proven performance. We have explored and implemented the design of MEMS micro p...

Patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) is a common disorder that afflicts people across all age groups, and results in various degrees of knee pain. The diagnosis of PFPS is difficult since the exact biomechanical factors and the extent to which they are affected by the disorder are still unknown. Recent research has reported significant statistical d...

Our mobility is an important daily requirement so much so that any disruption to it severely degrades our perceived quality of life. Studies in gait and human movement sciences, therefore, play a significant role in maintaining the well-being of our mobility. Current gait analysis involves numerous interdependent gait parameters that are difficult...

This paper reviews the currently available instrumentation used for gait studies and discusses the clinical suitability of the various methods of recording gait parameters. Most of the presently available motion analysis systems appear to be more suited to research than to the routine clinical situation. However the video vector visualization techn...

Ground reaction force (GRF) time recordings are frequently corrupted due to faulty stepping on a force platform during gait, and this results in the loss of valuable data and the need for additional data acquisition. This paper proposes a new approach based on artificial neural networks for the estimation of lost key gait parameters using the avail...

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a non-progressive neuro-developmental condition that occurs in early childhood and is associated with a motor impairment, usually affecting mobility and posture. Automatic accurate identification of CP gait has many potential applications, for example, assistance in diagnosis, clinical decision-making and communication among...

Microarray expression data is one of the most widely used to find patterns in genetic expressions. The DNA microarray technique participates as one of the leading methods in cancer research. Due to the presence of immense noise, fewer numbers of samples and huge amount of genes, the useful genomic knowledge extraction from this technique is an impo...

The use of sensors in studies of human movement and gait is now fast gaining attention as a promising alternative to video capture systems in gait laboratories. Inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes have been deployed to detect acceleration and angular velocities of body landmarks, from which secondary quantities such as velocity,...

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) can lead to pain and disability in the older population. Excessive loading has been suggested to contribute to the development of knee OA. In this paper, we investigated the frequency components in accelerometric signals of the tibia in the anterior-posterior (AP), medial-lateral (ML) and vertical (Vert) directions during w...

Tripping and slipping falls are serious health concerns for the elderly because they incur high medical costs and can result in life threatening injuries i.e., internal bleeding. Recently there has been an increased interest in the development of portable inertial sensing devices for measuring human movement. These devices employ acceleration and a...

Measurement of interface pressure between the foot and shoe underpins a number of important applications in gait analysis. Abnormal pressure may indicate instability in gait, risks of ulceration development especially in diabetic foot as well as many other biomedical diagnostic applications. Since the currently available foot pressure sensors exhib...

Inertial sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes) have recently gained attention as a promising alternative to video capture systems in studies of human movement. Secondary quantities such as velocity and displacement are calculated through integration of acceleration and angular velocities. It is now widely accepted that this technique is greatly i...

As a promising alternative to laboratory-constrained video capture systems in studies of human movement, inertial sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes) are recently gaining popularity. Secondary quantities such as velocity, displacement and joint angles can be calculated through integration of acceleration and angular velocities. It is broadly ac...

This paper investigates the use of machine learning to predict a sensitive gait parameter based on acceleration information from previous gait cycles. We investigate a k-step look-ahead prediction which attempts to predict gait variable values based on acceleration information in the current gait cycle. The variable is the minimum toe clearance whi...

Measurement of the foot and shoe interface pressure underpins a number of important applications. Abnormal pressure may indicate instability in gait, risks of diabetic ulceration and many other biomedical and sports applications. As the current foot pressure sensors in the market exhibit many limitations, a new sensor design based on the more promi...