Walking on a daily basis is one of the best ways to maintain one’s healthy life, increasing physical activity. Gait analysis plays a pivotal role in maintaining a healthy and symmetrical gait; however, injuries, aging, and sedentary lifestyles as well as medical operations can negatively affect the healthy gait. Gait has been analyzed by fixed frame systems in laboratory settings, which has disadvantages due to spatial limitations, high costs and different environments to measure one’s daily gait. Nowadays, pedometers and smart wearable devices can provide gait analysis outside the laboratory; however, the devices can measure a limited number of gait parameters. Hence, a real time single head worn inertial measurement unit (H-IMU) solution recently has been developed based on peak detection (PD) algorithm, which can analyze more gait parameters, measure daily walking patterns outside the laboratory, and enable measurement at a lower cost. This paper will assess the validity of the H-IMU on a 400-m track and on a grass football field. Results demonstrated that the 95% confidence interval of MAEs (95CI-MAEs) of foot-ground contact time (CT) was 31.23 ± 2.37 ms on a 400-m track and 41.26 ± 2.68 ms on the grass (n = 13). The results of the validation tests were also compared with other single IMU systems. This temporal accuracy indicates that the single head worn IMU system is applicable to real time gait monitoring systems as well as real time sensorimotor feedback systems.
