ExoGait-MS: Learning Periodic Dynamics with Multi-Scale Graph Network for Exoskeleton Gait Recognition

Abstract

Current exoskeleton control methods often face challenges in delivering personalized treatment. Standardized walking gaits can lead to patient discomfort or even injury. Therefore, personalized gait is essential for the effectiveness of exoskeleton robots, as it directly impacts their adaptability, comfort, and rehabilitation outcomes for individual users. To enable personalized treatment in exoskeleton-assisted therapy and related applications, accurate recognition of personal gait is crucial for implementing tailored gait control. The key challenge in gait recognition lies in effectively capturing individual differences in subtle gait features caused by joint synergy, such as step frequency and step length. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel approach, which uses Multi-Scale Global Dense Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) in the spatial domain to identify latent joint synergy patterns. Moreover, we propose a Gait Non-linear Periodic Dynamics Learning module to effectively capture the periodic characteristics of gait in the temporal domain. To support our individual gait recognition task, we have constructed a comprehensive gait dataset that ensures both completeness and reliability. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves an impressive accuracy of 94.34% on this dataset, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 3.77%. This advancement underscores the potential of our approach to enhance personalized gait control in exoskeleton-assisted therapy.